


Granger's Nightmares

by miriams-darkfics (small_miriam)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Bigotry & Prejudice, Dark fic, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Hermione Granger will have her revenge, Impregnation, Loss of Virginity, Nightmares, Non-Consensual Somnophilia, Possessive Behavior, Rape, Rape/Non-con Elements, Somnophilia, Stalking, Survivorship and trauma, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-23
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:55:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 9
Words: 38,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23276698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/small_miriam/pseuds/miriams-darkfics
Summary: The Dark Lord is dead.  Antonin Dolohov flees.  But he has unfinished business with a particular mudblood, and a perfect torture for her: stalking her in her nightmares.  What starts out as a hunt for revenge, however, soon slips into an obsession that Hermione can't escape.
Relationships: Antonin Dolohov/Hermione Granger
Comments: 265
Kudos: 459





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> After the Dark Lord falls, Antonin Dolohov has unfinished business with a particular mudblood.
> 
> This piece explicitly explores sexual violence between a blood supremacist and a muggleborn in the Harry Potter universe, as well as associated themes of bigotry, rape and reproductive violence. Please mind the tags. If sexual violence is upsetting to you, please take care of yourself and do not read this work. 
> 
> This piece uses language that’s more typical of someone born to a higher class in the first half of the 20th century. It is inspired by accounts of sexual violence by upper class men in the 19th and early 20th century.

Antonin Dolohov stared down at the little Mudblood’s muggle flat from his perch atop the opposite building. Waiting. 

Britain’s wizards were lacking in some of the finer cruel instruments, he reflected.

Their torture was blunt and indelicate. 

Lucius, anxious as he was to impress, would always leave muggles a pulpy mess, and often fussed over the mist of blood that would inevitably dust his hair. Bellatrix’s repetitive, shrill cruciatus curses became so tiresome that he was almost glad to hear she had died alongside the Dark Lord in the Battle for Hogwarts.

But the art of torture in his mother tongue held baroque nuance. 

The Dark Lord had indulged in his talents during the first war, but resurrection had not made him whole. He no longer had patience for the finer forms of torture. Calculated cunning had given way to something desperate, ill, panicked - defined by a lack of something. A lack of rigour, perhaps. 

And a panicked master is a temporary master.

For some time - well before he fled the Battle of Hogwarts - Antonin had silently sent owls out to liquidate many of his family’s assets in Russia, anticipating a long period of wandering. Azkaban was a cage that had dulled his reflexes, and his senses cried out for material comforts and hot-blooded pursuits. There was no need to commit to a dying cause, was there? Mudbloods walked openly in magical society, as if equals. Old families produced thin-blooded wizards. The Malfoys had become cowardly, the Blacks mad - and that was saying nothing of blood traitors. 

Something fundamental was falling away. 

The golden age of natural order was in full decay. 

Given enough time, Antonin knew, a proper hierarchy would rise again, but natural order needed hot-blooded chaos to stoke the fires of worthy blood. He trusted that the next Dark Lord would rise in a generation or two, wielding strength and rigour. Perhaps a bloodline of his own. 

Until then, he would wander. A dark sabbatical of finer pleasures. 

Yet something deep and unfinished in him ached to find the little mudblood first. He knew it had taken hold when he saw her photograph in the Daily Prophet, the day after the Dark Lord had fallen. 

A gentle smile. 

A scar that started on her decolletage, flecking the soft skin that peeked out from her muggle garments, that swooped out of sight. 

_His_ mark. 

He had torn her, but she had lived.

Once the idea had taken hold, it was not a decision but a cruel compulsion that forced his hand to seek her out. And there she was - fumbling loudly with muggle keys on the street below, clad in muggle garments. She was no longer the little girl that defied him in the Hall of Prophecies. She was now deserving of a much finer torture. 

Something deep sighed inside him. 

He enjoyed his vantage point atop the opposite muggle flats. Like standing upwind in a hunt. It was only a matter of time until she was asleep.

He rotated his wand arm in his robes and idly decided that he would not put his mouth on the mudblood.

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The nightmare curse, _Marsomnyem,_ was one such spell without a British counterpart; a superb cruelty that lifted a victim out of sleep and into a semi-paralytic, semi-wakeful state. Limbs felt intolerably heavy. Hands twitched in response to demands. The tongue felt thick in the mouth.

Most importantly, it was indistinguishable to the victim from a nightmare. 

To this day russian wizards warded the beds of their daughters to prevent such interference. Durmstrang took the same precautions around the sleeping quarters of its women. 

But the British were tender lambs. 

Historically, they had always been wedded to their warded walls, their parameters. No warded beds. No bedroom precautions. When the parameter wards were teased apart and punctured, they sat unaware inside like safe, ripe hens. 

The softness of her wards had surprised Antonin earlier that week, although the Daily Prophet had reported that the flat had been gifted to her from the estate of a so-called war hero. She had fast become less a soldier and more a sitting duck. Had she forgotten about him, about the other Death Eaters that fled? Or perhaps she was too embarrassed to have someone re-ward a gifted home. 

He watched the sky turn dark, felt the evening grow cold. Once her lights went out, his blood began to sing. Waiting for several more hours made it roar, until in the small hours of the morning he decided it was time. To his delight a muggle fire exit had even supplied discrete entry into her living room. He warded the room into silence, opened back the curtains and windows, and decided he would have her here. 

The swirling night air did wonders for hot blood. 

Her flat was generously sized, with wooden floors that dared not make a noise against his charmed boots. Stalking silently through her home, Antonin felt his heartbeat thrumming. He found her in the bedroom. 

Beneath his looming figure at the foot of the bed, she lay on her back in gentle sleep. One of her hands rested beside her head on the pillow, palm-up towards the ceiling, fingers bent gently. 

In another world she was a beautiful corpse laid out. A stripe of light from between the curtains poured into the dark room to lie across her body. The white sheet across her lap could be a burial shroud pulled down by the voyeur anatomist.

A stark contrast to his black dueling robes. 

He stepped silently to her side and lifted a curl from her face carefully with the tip of his wand. 

“ _Marsomnyem_.”

She gasped, and her heavy-lidded eyes opened for a moment, lolling open and shut several times, her brows twitching into a frown as she fought. Her head turned slightly towards him.

“You,” she breathed.

“Yes.” He slid his hand down the line of buttons on her night shirt. She had not long been a woman, but he felt the start of a fuller feminine silhouette beneath her nightclothes. He felt himself respond, twitching heavy against his trousers in hot anticipation.

Her wand immediately twitched off of the bedside table towards her hand and clattered onto the floor. 

_My, my._

Few managed such wordless magic in such a paralytic state. Perhaps her survival in the Hall of Prophecies was not only good fortune. Antonin had blamed fourteen years of Azkaban eroding his reflexes. His darting movements were slow, his wand arm heavier than the snap he enjoyed in the first wizarding war. Had she turned her wand to kill him then, he would have rightfully died that night. The weak deserved death.

He lowered his own wand down, across her throat, travelling further.

“How you have evaded me, little one.” His wand looped the buttons apart one by one as it drew down to her navel. “How _hateful_ that you would drive my blood to be hot for you.” 

“ _Stu...pe...fy_ ,” she whispered as her eyelids lolled open and closed again. The hand beside her head twitched, the fingers curling shut around nothing but cool air. 

Eyelids struggled furiously to remain open as his hands pressed her nightshirt open.

_Ah, yes_.

His mark. He had longed to meet it properly. 

A dimpled scar swept from the small of her collarbone down the ripple of her body. Her gasps pulled the delicate muscles across her ribcage taught in waves. Here in the dark, she could have been a statue - a young woman in suffering, looking on her death.

“You were clever to silence me before this spell, mudblood. When it lands properly, it cuts perfectly. The blood stays hot and slippery until it all comes out.” Antonin’s finger began to trace down her decolletage, making her skin rise into goosebumps. “It tore at you very gently, I see."

He pressed a finger down the rippled flesh to the crook of her hip where it swooped up. He had marked her well. The protruding hip reminded him that they were not long in peacetime; she had evaded the Death Eaters for many hungry months. 

Were she a doe on his family grounds in russia, he would turn her loose to keep him fed another day. 

Yet she was something more belligerent. 

“ _A_ …” She looked at the ceiling with desperate determination. “ _A...ccio...wa…_ ”

Her wand beneath the bed rolled into his boot on the wooden floor. Useless wood against useless wood.

Terror began to settle into her angry expression. Her skin prickled into bumps under the cool air as he pulled his fingertips across her skin. 

His hand wandered up her fluttering belly to press his thumb across a taut pink nipple. Idly, Antonin wondered if it would be best to collapse her throat beneath his grasp and let her thrash with him settled between her legs. Her flushed face would slip into a delicate eggshell blue by the time he would be finished. 

_Save magic for deserving acts_ , his father had once said. 

But that would not do. 

His magic had touched her body, yet hers had dared touched his mind. 

“You know,” he explained, rolling the nipple in his hand, “in my native country, memory charms are singularly offensive. For someone to alter the mind that way - especially a mudblood - it means to solicit a duel to the death.”

“ _Ex...pell…i..._ ” Her enraged resolve knitted her brows together. It flooded him with something hungry that burned deep in his belly - the resistance was simply exquisite. He vanished the rest of the garments she was wearing. The sight of her sent hungry throbs through his loins.

“Shall we duel to your death, little one?”

He decided, as he scooped her figure from the bed, to take the sheet with him - a shroud for her once he was done. It wasn’t proper to leave a woman uncovered. 

Yet he would not deign to drape his robe over her body, as was custom for a newly deceased witch of his own station. She could be found tangled in her own sheets.

She breathed hot gasps against his neck. 

“ _E...ner...vate…_ ”

Her body was light in his arms as he stalked through to the largest room of her home. 

Perhaps she was _too_ light for his tastes, typically, but she had become an exception in his life. Who else dared survive dueling him? Who else dared use a memory charm on him? He laid out her naked body on the ground and raked hungry eyes over her. Chipped colour on her nails, wild curls splayed around her head. One hand once again beside her head, still grasping at emptiness. Goosebumps and taut nipples in the freezing night air that swirled around them. Enraged, glistening eyes that drifted back and forth.

She would be a delicate corpse, if anyone would find her in time. 

Antonin looped an arm behind her shoulder and buried a hand into her hair, pulling to open up her neck, desperate face forced back. 

_Oh yes_. 

“ _Ah-_ ” she gasped with indignance. He pulled his hot length free from his trousers, feeling cool air against him. 

The robes, however, stayed on - this was business, as well as pleasure. He would put her down as both a woman and a witch. Besides, no matter how beautiful her skin was in the soft night light, it would not do to have it against his own skin.

He wondered when he might lift the spell so the nightmare could become her last living moments of lucid terror. Later, he decided - pleasure must come first, in this instance. 

Kneeling between her splayed legs, he traced his fingers down her body before settling himself hard against her core, finding the searing heat. Her eyes flashed and seemed to search around the room. Perhaps, he thought, she couldn’t see with her eyes lolling open and shut. He reached forward and pulled her face to look at his, and stared deep into her eyes. Were they always so black and searching, hateful and seething - and terrified? He hoped not. Their harm was intimate, was mutual. A violation for a violation. 

He looked down at their bodies, his twitching cock against her soft folds. His hands looped around her thighs and pulled her closer. She had a woman’s body yet - and he would use it. 

He thrust against her warmth.

A tender, soft snap yielded her body to his, as he pressed deep. She pulled a useless hand to push at his hip and cried out in anguish.

With raised brows, he looked down to where their bodies joined to see a flash of scarlet blood glistening along his length. 

“ _Oh_ , lovely girl.” Antonin surveyed her taut body splayed beneath him. “Have I torn you a _second_ time?”

Hot, wet blood made her clenching resistance futile, sent waves of demanding passion up through his loins. Slippery vermillion smudged where they joined. He watched himself press into her - press her _apart_ \- again and again in rolling urgency. 

He surged forward, pressed hard against her on the floor with his arms either side of her head. 

“Your blood is filthy, little witch,” he murmured into her ear.

These were the slippery sensations of a traditional witch bride taken properly. Not the spoiled purebloods of today's feeble noble houses. Wet sounds lapped at his ears, punctuating his long, pressing thrusts that buried him inside her desperate resistance. He danced his hands along her side, feeling the trembling in the striations of her ribs as they heaved for more air.

The girl's eyes were glistening with fury in the dark. Her hand jerked up momentarily.

A flash of magic struck hot against his shoulder. That made him smirk. 

_She has strong magic - true magic._

“Rage suits you so well.” Dark pleasure was coiling deep in his belly. “You could be a half-blood yet.” He pumped himself flat against her again and again, ripping quiet whimpers from her trembling lips. “Are you? Was your mother a whore?” 

He looped his arm beneath her, crushed her ribcage to his body and dragged the scent of fresh sweat in from the crook of her neck. It seemed beneath him to put his mouth on her. Yet the way her magic struck through in furious waves, with her mouth trembling open in constant furious defiance - it was irresistible. He swallowed her small cries. Hot, shallow gasps in his mouth made muscles deep in his pelvis ache as he rolled inside her. 

There was no power hunting the weak, but this was true ruination of a proper witch. A shame she hadn't been bred.

The desire to be buried to the hilt burned in him. He pushed himself back on his knees to gaze at her terror, impaled around his glistening pleasure. His arm wound around a splayed leg and pulled her close, driving himself further. He buried himself as far as he could, finding her end, her pain, to his own twitching pleasure. 

“ _Stop_ ,” she demanded, with eyes again drifting across the ceiling - as if a poltergeist were ruining her. 

_Perhaps a poltergeist is the nightmare she has of me now_ , he thought. _I could give her many._

He knew to make her humiliation complete. Reaching down, he found in her pink folds the tender bump of nerves that could make a witch scream. He rolled the pad of his fingers across her in a languid circle.

“ _A... Accio…w..._ ” she gasped, cutting herself short. 

Her hand twitched and was brought up to her face. Perhaps in defence, or perhaps in shame.

" _No…_ " she sobbed. 

_Oh_ yes _. There we are._

Stuttered spell attempts had finally dissolved into sobbing whimpers at his long strokes. She had managed to turn her face away, and a hot flush spread across her cheeks and down her chest. Her legs twitched and jerked against him. 

The clenching fluttering around his length grew taught and trembled. The sight of her shame sent something hateful and coiled and hot that sent jolts up inside his loins. 

His rolling strokes quickened. 

“ _No…_ ” She turned away from him. A hand forced her face back. He crowded against her, on top of her, his full form against the length of her, panting down the crook of her neck. Angry prickles of magic needled at him from their skin contact, and it made his blood _scream_ that she was furious and strong, that her face was dry, that no tears had rolled down her face.

He thought - no, he could no longer think - he _felt_ her quivering body and her desperation, the urgent swan song of her magic fighting him for survival, her arms huddled against her chest, and the blush hot under his hands as he made her fall apart and open up for him and cry out in humiliation- 

He forgot himself entirely and slipped into his mother tongue. _“Do you want my children buried up inside you, little witch?”_ He smelled terror in her sweat. _“Could you bear it?”_

His words were stolen from him as his eyes fluttered. Searing hot pleasure surged his hips to jolt himself deep in her end, pulsing his climax hard against her. Blood roared in his ears, screaming at him to _go deeper_ , to _tear again_ , to _bury himself_ , to _fill her_. 

It tore at him.

His loins burned to fill her very core with rage, with possession, with domination. He shuddered and spent himself with abandon.

She squirmed beneath him with a breathless whimper.

He heard himself panting. 

The thunderous roar in his ears subsided.

His arm had crushed her into him and her rabbit heart thumped faintly against his chest. She whimpered.

She had survived him once more.

As his heavy breath swirled in the dark room, his thoughts drifted. Her mother could have been a muggle whore, and lain with a hot-blooded wizard who spent inside her carelessly. The girl’s militant resistance and snaps of magic through the paralysis were exquisite opposition. 

He pressed the tip of his wand against her rapid pulse. It was still galloping enough to bounce against his wand. 

_Somnyem_ , he whispered in his mind.

She slipped deep into sleep, stilling her gasps, and he laid her down beside him on the floor. He stared at her body, and absent-mindedly reached out to roll a single curl of her hair between his fingers. 

Glistening spent seed and red blood had smeared together across her thighs. Pearls before swine. 

And yet.

Settling a baby inside her would lose him no sleep. As most noble families in eastern Europe knew, bastard children were not only a healthy expression of dominion, but were even considered to improve local stock. They inherited nothing but the opportunity to prove themselves. If the British families had taken more care to keep the mixed-blooded strong, they would not have ended up with such weak noble houses. 

Her narrow hips and gentle slope of breasts would make it difficult for her. 

No doubt the magical strength of the baby would strike her sick through the pregnancy. 

She would have to be strong to survive. 

But that strength couldn't come from a true mudblood, he reasoned. Her mother must have been a whore. This was a half-blooded witch bleeding beside him. The proof was in her strength.

His hand slid up along soft flesh to her knee and pressed her open again, finding the raw, glistening pink between her legs that bled. He pulled his wand out from his robe and cast a spell to knit her together again. Another spell made her clean. His hand pulled apart the thigh, plush flesh dimpling beneath his fingers, to see virgin skin stretched across her pink opening once more.

He still had his mark roped across her chest. That seated a sense of possessive satisfaction, if he was to let her loose. There were more ways to never be without a man again.

He had enough money. He could linger in London until this pleasure was properly spent.

He knew he would return.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After waking up from a horrific nightmare involving Antonin Dolohov, Hermione begins to investigate.
> 
> Again, please note the tags for this fiction - if reading about rape will be harmful or uncomfortable for you, please take care of yourself and skip this fanfic.

“Accio wand!”

Hermione’s wand flew into her hand, the whites of her eyes shining. 

She bolted upright, eyes fixed unwavering on the open bedroom doorway in the dark, and yanked the sheet tight to her chest to hide herself. 

Only - she was dressed in her cotton pajamas. Breathless, she ran her hand down the front buttons, as if to make sure it was truly there, if the buttons all lined up, or to sense somehow if Dolohov-

 _Dolohov_.

She leveled her attention again at the door, steadying her wand ready.

 _Constant vigilance_ , echoed at the back of her mind. One foot dropped down to pad onto the wooden floor, then the other, eyes fixed on the door to the living room as she crept forward with purpose. 

Something in her belly spasmed in pain at the effort of standing up.

The living room curtains were drawn. Windows closed. The sky was beginning to become a backlit grey as the morning sun drew near, but she could _just_ see that the living room chairs were empty - only the familiar forms of furniture in the dark. 

“ _Homenum Revelio_.”

Nothing.

She held her breath and padded through to the guest bedroom, then hesitated in the hallway, inching closer to the laundry, opening the door as every sound felt like a crashing symbol in her ears, before-

“Crookshanks! _God_ , Crookshanks.” 

Crookshanks yowled, throwing her an angry squint over his shoulder from his place curled up in the laundry basket. She clutched her chest for a thrumming moment.

“Oh, I’m _so_ sorry,” she gasped, heaving him up into her arms. She buried her face in his fur and tried to ignore the adrenaline that had lit her nerves up. Her chest heaved and she was still shaking. “I shut you in again, didn’t I?”

\---------------------------------------------

She found herself standing in the doorway of her living room, still in her pajamas, after putting down food for an irritable Crooks. The sun was close to rising and she was losing track of time, replaying in her head over and over again what had happened with a fine-tooth comb.

_She’d gone to bed, taking with her a backlog of letters that she thought she’d try to work through, but she could barely keep her eyes open and had abandoned them for sleep._

_At some point in the night, the air became heavy - as if it sat perched on her chest. It draped itself flat against her, pinning her limbs to the bed, and then slid further up into her mouth like thick molasses. The heavy sensation slithered down her throat and eventually settled into her lungs like a constriction around her ribs that would only let her take in small gasps of air._

_The soft sound of rustling fabric beside her head-_

Rustling?

_Her heart-rate rocketed. She snapped her head to the side - or at least tried, but her head barely rolled to the left, and her eyelids felt like anchors, lolling shut almost as soon as she heaved them open. One glimpse to her side made her heart stop in her throat._

_The face of Antonin Dolohov hung above her._

You _, she thought, and flew into action._

Accio wand _, she demanded._ Accio wand _!_

_But her palm felt nothing but air. She could hear Dolohov speaking - not in the sound of clipped spells, but in a deep, accented voice with no urgency, the voice of a man taking his time. She could barely make out the words. It was as if the words had been smudged in her ears._

My wand _, she thought with desperation._ Has he taken it? Is he trying to transport me alive? 

_Her adrenaline barely kept her eyes open for a second at a time before they sunk down again, and it gave her vision a slow strobing effect. She could barely see anything except his giant form looming form above her, curling dark hair hanging over his eyes._

_Eyes black with hunger. Eyes that had gleamed at her from the Hall of Prophecy._

_Her internal thoughts of thrashing on the bed yielding nothing but pathetic twitches in her limbs, but panicked instinct demanded she keep trying. He was still speaking, but even her hearing seemed to fade in and out._

_Suddenly, her pajamas were pulled back. Her eyes couldn’t keep open. The night air coiled down against her skin and wrapped itself around her nipple, pulling it painfully. But it was too textured - was it fingers?_

What-

Expelliarmus _, she barked out mentally._ Enervate! 

_She felt like time was distorting, as if it was a moment that short circuited and repeated in a glitch of time - she couldn’t tell if her nipple was being rolled for a few seconds or a few minutes. Every tight rotation between his fingers sent a shiver shooting down her belly,_

_Again-_

_And again-_

_And again while his voice hummed-_

_And the heavy night air seemed to play tricks on her, coiling around her throat and beneath her, lifting her up and crushing her together -_

_until suddenly she was on the wooden floor of her living room, and the heavy night air coiled around her legs, pushing them apart, while Hermione tried to thrash, but she could barely manage to twitch, even her left hand barely able to grasp the sheet beneath her-_

Hermione grasped her pajamas, hugging her waist. She stood in the living room, staring at that very spot on the floor, and noticed her hands wringing the cotton material of her sleepwear. As if she could pull them on in the memory. 

Memory?

Well, no nightmare had felt that real. The details felt blurry and smudged in some aspects, but too real and vivid in others.

She stalked back to her room and threw back the covers.

“ _Lumos_.” Her knuckles were white around her wand. 

There wasn’t any blood. Plenty of ginger cat hair on the duvet - but also on the sheet as well, and Crooks only slept on top of the duvet covers. Did it just get there because he was on the bed so often? 

She walked back to the lounge, holding her arms tight around her waist, and glowered at the floor. 

Sure, there was cat hair on the floor. There wasn’t much time to learn domestic spells these days, between the rebuilding efforts and the endless stream of letters that never seemed to abate. People wanted to express gratitude, to reach out, to ask for company at events. Even with her careful management - organising them by priority, filling her spare moments between engagements with scribbles on parchment - the letter organiser on her bedside table was spilling over. 

She’d always replied quickly to her fellow wartime companions, though. Neville was doing terribly and wrote to her that he’d found himself terrified of snakes now, so he’d stopped going outside and found himself lonely. Molly desperately wanted George to keep in touch with everyone to keep up good spirits. 

Hermione looked over her shoulder at the wooden letter organiser on her bedside table, as the sun started streaming through her window. George wrote to her recently that Lee Jordan kept having recurring nightmares that he couldn’t find his way out of secret passageways in Hogwarts. She should really reply to that.

This was stress.

They were all going through it. 

Hermione knew that the wizarding world was miles behind the muggle world’s understanding of trauma, especially with the ability to magic away a lot of the primary effects of war like physical injuries. But...

Something fundamental felt persistently wrong. 

She hugged herself, driving her fingers into her sides-

_-long fingers drove deep into her thighs, with thumbs grasping around the bone of her pelvis. The night air coiled and became something blunt and scalding hot until it found the folds between her legs, driving in, causing a web of shooting pain._

_Soft pressing circles on her clit jolted her legs-_

_Slick wetness slid out of her, across her thighs-_

_And her ribs were pinned beneath the heavy chest of Antonin Dolohov so forcefully that she couldn’t breath when he twitched inside her-_

Hermione whirled around and darted into the bathroom, leaning over the toilet as her mouth began to feel wet. She took a slow breath in and felt comforted by her wand fisted in her hand.

A shower. She needed a shower, and to start her day, and to think about anything else. She would defeat this. She needed to be useful. To reply to letters, to fundraise, to check on Neville and George, and didn’t someone say that Luna wasn’t replying to letters much anymore?

She started the water and started mapping out her day. Get out a stack of books on trauma and call a mind healer, or a muggle psychologist if the healer didn’t know what to do. How she would fib to a muggle psychologist about being in a war, she had no idea, so she had better look up what wars they had been having recently.

She stood in the shower, debating where to put her wand, before putting it in the caddy with her body wash. She felt another dull ache deep inside her belly that twinged when she twisted around to reach for her shampoo.

Was her period due? Was that it? 

Sometimes her cramps would keep her up at night, but maybe this was her body’s way of making sense of everything happening - the rush of the war, the whirlwind of adjusting to life afterwards, her monthly cycle hopefully becoming regular again after all the stress, the occasional aches and pains. Maybe in the nightmare, her orgasm was just-

Hermione scowled and slammed the shampoo bottle back in its place. She scrubbed her hair until her scalp hurt. Until her hair squeaked clean under her fingertips, as if in protest.

It was only when she was rinsing off that she let her hands drift down to her sex, daring to touch - was it tender? Was it the same? 

_Of course it is,_ she said to herself. But she still checked. And it was.

Another shadow of an ache in her belly-

Harry. She’d have Harry over for dinner again. Things were still weird with Ron, but Harry always took her mind off things. She’d invite him over, and find some proper books - Muggle or mind healing - on surviving a war, on nightmares and trauma.

She sat down in her living room. Another twinging down below sent a gasp out from her lips, and she braced her hands on her thighs, pushing as if to push her own body away, up and away from the pains and the scar, and this god-awful fallout of the war.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Do you still get nightmares, sometimes?” She’d asked Harry after they’d settled in with food. Muggle London had far better take-away options, and they both needed more weight on their bones with less public attention, so she and Harry often found themselves bundled up on her sofa in the evenings in front of the tv.

“Are you kidding, Hermione?” He chewed for a few moments. “We all do.”

She nodded in muted agreement, staring at the floor. A floor that she certainly hadn’t ever laid down on- 

_-it felt so cold on her back as he-_

“Makes me feel less lonely to be honest.” Her head snapped back to Harry, away from the empty space on the floor. “Knowing you get them too. Ginny even - she sleepwalks sometimes, you know. Around the Burrow.”

Hermione toyed with her food for a moment. She should get her wards checked. Maybe see if there was a russian translator - if it was a nightmare, where had that russian babble in her ear come from? Did it mean anything? The only russian she’d known was a small blonde girl in her primary school class when she was eight years old.

She noticed Harry looking at her. “It’s awful,” she said, even if just to fill the silence.

“Yeah.”

“So, how do you guys deal with it?”

“The sleep-walking? Well, Ginny did roll her ankle on a garden gnome the other week, so we spent a morning clearing gnomes.”

“I meant the nightmares, Harry.”

He considered it for a moment. Her attention drifted up to the celtic-braided plasterwork on the ceiling. She _had_ noticed that plasterwork before, right? When she first arrived with boxes moving in, she’d seen it- 

_-eyes drifted over and over the celtic plasterwork on the ceiling, while shooting pain shot through her legs again and again, accompanied by an excruciating pressure rushing between her legs-_

“I’m not sure we’ve figured out how to deal with nightmares just yet.”

Hermione swallowed. 

It took her a few moments to process what he’d said, then her brows tugged together in a scowl. 

She wasn’t considered the brightest witch of her age for nothing, so she was filled with a burning vengeance to _figure it out_. She needed to get control. 

_Constant vigilance, huh_ , she thought later that evening, slamming their plates into the sink.

Crookshanks trilled at her ankle.

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The week dragged by like a miserable donkey with its heels dug in. Too many interviews with the ministry had worn down on her goodwill and reduced her pleasantries to terse goodbyes at the end of long days. Between her day-time obligations she’d barely made it through the first five chapters of a muggle trauma book, _Assessing Psychological Trauma and PTSD_. By Monday evening the following week, she’d pulled on her pajamas, given it a look of dread at the end of her day and collapsed on her bed.

Not tonight, she thought, and sighed into her pillow. Even though it was just a muggle book, she felt it almost look back at her - as if it was telling her off for not taking it seriously. She flicked off the lights and didn’t bother taking her socks off before pulling the covers up.

Some hours later, in the pitch of night, a heavy feeling of cool air slid over her, down across her arms, coiling up her neck and slithering down her throat and around her ribs-

_No-_

-and then further down to her legs, curling around her toes, gripping her tight to the bed. Her ribs struggled under the constriction. 

_No!_

She hadn’t managed to find anything useful in books, except about sleep paralysis - and even then, there was nothing to be said about actually escaping them. She felt a wave of anger towards herself, at her exhaustion for not seeing if there was a magical prevention for sleep paralysis-

“Sweet witch, you are an addiction.”

Her heart thumped furiously in her ears. _Accio wand_. 

A loud wooden clatter sounded up from the floor, but the sound was muted - as though it had to travel through a long tunnel to get to her ears. Her eyelids felt like lead again.

 _Think, Hermione_ . _Is this real?_

There was a swirl of rustling to the side of her bed, before the sound of a few quiet clinks rang out in the air, accompanied by what sounded like fabric being bundled. She heaved her eyelids open to see - not a pillar of black with a terrifying face over her, but a burly bare chest turned in profile. 

Antonin Dolohov was laying his robes over her bedroom desk chair. 

Bile stung the back of her tongue as gasps fluttered in and out of her constricted chest. He almost looked lingering, as if he were taking his time. The curtain had been pulled back, the window opened, to let in light from the street. The smell of woodfire smoke and pine drifted over her nostrils - distinctly _un_ -London. 

Hermione had never smelled in her dreams, she was sure of it. 

The sheets and duvet were swept off of her, but somehow the weight pinning her down remained just as vivid. Her pajamas seemed to evaporate away into the black night air. 

_This needs to stop. This feels too real._

The edge of the mattress dipped, then plunged down on each side alongside her, and a calloused hand found her scar at the collarbone. It lingered a moment, then traced it down with agonising leisure. She internally swore.

Her eyes flickered open to see Dolohov’s face hanging just above her own, abject hunger written into his harsh expression. He had made a cage around her with arms, with legs, with his body, and she was trembling like a rabbit.Her eyelids winced closed as he leaned close, and his finger lingered at the tail of her scar on her hip. 

_Wake up!_

“You still wander this world by my permission, furious one,” Dolohov murmured beside her ear. It felt disgusting to hear it so close to her, exactly the same voice as last time. The noises of his tongue, his teeth, his sharp accent, and even the warm air shifting from his voice. She realised that the oppressive paralysis had probably stopped her from hyperventilating. 

“Do you know how you feel here?” A calloused hand pressed gently down on her belly below her belly-button. “Warm. Ready. _Angry_. And you don’t know it, yourself.” 

_Get away!_

A snap of magic cracked at his hand like static. She heard a laugh, deep in his chest - like a rumble. 

She called for her wand again and heard it flutter on the floor. Her mind raced. She had had nightmares before, had woken up Harry during the horcrux hunt more times than she cared to remember, but those nightmares were flashes - distorted from reality, with exaggerations and absurdities. This could be a curse to give her nightmares from afar. 

_Or it was completely real._

She felt the heavy weight of his body shift back down between her legs. Then something thick and blunt and burning was sliding up and down, down _there_. 

_Wait-_

For a brief moment, she opened her eyes to see him pressing her apart with splayed fingers, his huge figure looming over her on the bed. She saw a flash of his cock bursting up through his grip.

 _No, no, no no no_ -!

He ran a hand up and down her spread thigh for a moment, then she heard a deep hum from him. His voice softened and said something indistinguishable, placing his hand on her navel again. She couldn’t tell if it was a spell, or if he was speaking another language, or-

He inched down into her, forcing an elongated whimper from her lips that she wished was a blood-curling scream. That awful sliding of searing heat sunk into her and sent shocks of agony sparking through her. 

“ _Oh_ , you come apart so well, little witch,” she heard above her. “You have kept yourself so well for me.”

She cried out, and the glass of water on her bedside table cracked. The pain left her breathless, and when she felt his body pressed flat against her, a different shooting ache jolted up from deep inside her. His cock was heavy and fat and agonising. 

_Get away_ , she screamed, and her prickling magic swarmed on her skin to attack him where he touched her. 

“Oh, _yes_.” He slid flat against her again. “Do you want to survive?” Wet noises seemed to echo in her ears. “Show me.” He buried himself to the hilt again, the same excruciating pain spasming deep in her core. She felt her legs struggling, begging them to come back together, to kick him off, to respond to anything except falling apart and lying flat against the sheets beneath Dolohov’s grasp.

Through the agony, her mind was galloping ahead. _He didn’t kill me last time, but - this was far more vivid than last time. He must be using a memory charm of some kind - or at least he tried._

He fell forward over her as she willed her eyes open again. She was back inside the cage of his limbs, struck down below him, their bodies connected and her blood smeared between them. The sight of it stopped her thinking in her tracks and made her feel like she was going to be sick. She squirmed like a worm impaled on a hook.

“Do you know why witch wives don’t knit themselves together each time after their wedding night?” His mouth was flush against her ear again, the wet noises of his mouth again twisting her stomach taut as he rolled deep inside her. “Oh, their wizards long for it. But old magic hurts, doesn’t it?”

Her blood ran ice cold. 

“Our magic knows one another. You feel it. Your loins _know_ it. Even if you won’t, tomorrow.” 

She realised her legs were responding the most of all her limbs. They were able to twitch up and squirm, sliding up and down the bed, in a meagre gesture that barely reflected her intention to _scramble away_. Heaving them up, only for them to slide down pathetically on the sheets, again and again. She inwardly realised what he was saying and steeled herself.

_He won’t kill you._

_You MUST remember._

_You need to get away - take Crookshanks - stay away from this flat - get to the Aurors as fast as you can - get Harry -_

“Shall I sweeten this pain, my witch?”

As if he could sense her thinking, Dolohov’s heavy fingers found her clit stretched to a tight nub between her spread legs, and began massaging across it.

She felt acid roil up from her stomach. 

Jolts of pleasure wound tight in her belly, marred with the ache of him burying himself, the sensations blending together. 

She felt a panicked formless plea leave her lips. Time seemed to distend into a cruel rhythm of his thrusts, his fingers, burning slipperiness between her thighs and a tautness in her core that grew furious and demanding. 

She heaved her eyes up again, this time facing her letter organizer. She always lined letters up hard on the left hand side, to find at least one facet of order in her life. If she could push them out of line, jostle them haphazardly, she would leave absolute proof for herself tomorrow - even if she thought this was only a nightmare again. 

The intensity of the burning and wet sliding between her legs suddenly made it impossible to think, whimpering cries punctuated her shallow breaths and his hands on her clit sent shooting spasms- 

She shuddered and clenched around him in a climax she loathed, and her legs slid down the bed to try kick herself away. A flush of shame flooded her face and chest red. 

Heavy arms wrapped around her, crushed her body tight against his skin, feeling all at once his hot skin up and down against her whole body and a terrible throbbing twitching deep inside her.

He plunged deep into her and shuddered. The horror of it - of his climaxing into her - made her stomach churn in revulsion. She felt her eyes tear up, and blinked them open again to stare at the letters.

 _Do it now_ , she willed _._

She concentrated all the adrenaline swooping through her veins, the blood roaring in her ears, her skin crawling, the aching fire between her legs that still spasmed, her hands trembling in empty fists, and threw every fiber of her willpower at the letters.

The letters in the organizer jostled.

He still breathed in her ear.

She stared at the letters in the few moments that her vision could snatch, tried to burn it into her memory. She was desperately ignoring his body pressed along her. She scrambled to hold on, to _remember the letter organizer_ , to _trust it was real_.

A sharp point drove into the side of her throat. A tip of a wand. 

“You will never be without me, little witch.”

The heavy night air sank into her skin as icy pins and needles. It swirled into her consciousness, smudging the edges of her thoughts and memories, until she fell deep into rhythmic breathing, still crushed beneath Antonin Dolohov, leaving the shadow of a demand in her mind: to remember.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading the second chapter of my first fanfic! 
> 
> The next chapter is through the eyes of Hermione as the tables begin to turn against Antonin Dolohov, and will be up next Sunday.
> 
> Reviews are very welcome (and will no doubt keep me company during this quarantine period). Hope you're all safe out there. x


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After several nightmares of Antonin Dolohov, Hermione Granger makes a move.

Lying on her side, with tears drying on her face, Hermione Granger stared at the letter organizer on her bedside table.

It stared back at her.

Her mind was sifting through what parts of the nightmare she could remember. It was the same setting, in her bedroom, again with Antonin Dolohov . She’d woken with the same feeling of revulsion and disgust, an identical dull ache in her belly, and the same instinct to let the shower water hammer over her until it didn’t feel much like anything anymore. 

She pulled the pillow over her face and breathed slowly in and out of the fabric. It was overwhelming. Her memory of it was blurry, impressionistic in many ways, but she remembered one thing with searing clarity:

The letter organizer.

She dropped her legs over the side of the bed and slumped down onto the floor with her arms around her legs, glaring at the organizer.  _ What about the bloody thing? _ She felt sick in her mouth and slid a hand over her hair. 

_ How often are you going to do this, Hermione? _

One breath in, one breath out. 

Having a problem like this in the tent with Harry and Ron while horcrux hunting would have been humiliating, and Hermione was feeling incredibly grateful she had a flat on her own.

Slowly, as her eyes focused properly on the organizer, she remembered the desperate need to… She’d been staring at the letters while he-

_ -pulled her hair- _

-or at least, she imagined him pulling at her hair. But something uneasy caught her eye looking at the letters. It was just that they looked shaken up, like a child had rattled them. She stood to her feet and examined them with a scowl.

Something was off. She was meticulous in how she’d organised them. Harry and Ron had been so grateful when she said she’d accept correspondence on behalf of the three of them regarding the war or the rebuilding efforts. But when it had ballooned to a sisyphean task, she’d only managed to find small ways to feel like she had control. Color code letters. Bundle and file them in boxes. Organize by alphabetical order.

Line them up perfectly on the left side of the organizer. 

She felt odd, staring at it.

Without truly understanding why, as if it was a subconscious instinct that had bubbled up, she slid her hand slowly down her pants to check her knickers with trembling fingers.

They were clean and dry.

She snatched her hands back to her chest.

_ What’s going on, Hermione? _

She looked at her desk chair, absolutely sure that she had never been filled with dread at the sight of a chair before. She slowly approached it and bent down to smell it.

Pine. Smoke.

Her throat constricted.

She hadn’t been in a forest since the Forest of Dean. The urge to hyperventilate rose up but she strangled it down, then an image of Dolohov’s bare chest came to mind - folding his cloak over the chair.

Trauma, she thought. This is… what happens after war. 

The flat was quiet, the sun high up in the sky and shadows streamed down on her bed through the curtains. In fact, it was awfully quiet.

Her lips formed the word:

“Crooks?”

A tiny, muffled meow came from the other side of the flat. 

She felt wild with her hair loose and her wand in front of her as she stepped through the house. He usually pawed at her puffy face in the mornings if he hadn’t been fed by 8 o'clock or so. By the height of the sun, it was approaching midday.

“Crooks,” she called again.

First, nothing.

Then, a small meow came from behind the laundry door. 

Her blood flooded her ears and chest with a thrum of danger. Someone  _ else  _ had shut him in there. She’d  _ pinned _ that door back after last time. She was  _ certain _ .

Hermione could barely remember throwing the door open, snatching him up, running back and slamming the bedroom door behind her. Her thoughts were flying like cornish pixies in the wind and slipped through her mind in a whirlwind blur. She pulled a robe over her pajamas, yanking it closed tight in one hand while the other grasped her wand. Crooks peered up from her lap.

_ Harry _ .

He would be in Auror training now, so an owl might not find him quickly.

“ _ Expecto patronum _ .”

A silver stream of light faded at the tip of her wand and pattered into nothing. She swore, and her mind flitted about -  _ come on, come on _ \- until she forced it to be still on an image:

Her face pressed into her Mum outside platform 9 ¾, in a tight hug that felt soft and safe.

“ _ Expecto patronum _ !”

The otter burst out from her wand. She opened her mouth, then remembered her patronus might find him in front of a class of Auror trainees.

“Harry, please come.” She forced herself to be calm, and heard herself sound numb instead.  _ Was that any better? _ “Someone’s been in my flat.” 

Tears pricked at her eyes and she missed her Mum so much she could burst.

\-------------------------------

“Anonin Dolohov?” Harry’s face was appalled as he swept his hand through his hair. He’d come straight from muggle field-work by the look of his clothes and met her by the floo.

“While I’ve been asleep, he’s come inside - twice now.” 

_ That you know of. _

“Twice?” Harry demanded. “When? What did he do?”

She tried to swallow, but her mouth was dry. “Torture.”  _ Of a kind. _ “Not the Cruciatus Curse, but - something I didn’t recognize.” He started to interrupt with a look of horror, but she cut him off. “And- he tried to use a memory charm of some sort, Harry. It was unlike any other spells I’ve read about.”

“What do you mean?”

_ No-one will believe you if you say it felt like a nightmare, Hermione. _

“I only could remember parts of it. That’s why... I thought the first time was a nightmare.”

“And it wasn’t... was it?” He didn’t say it as an accusation, but it stung like one, and Hermione felt her eyes sting.

“No - my letter organizer was-”  _ jostled  _ “-knocked over.” She knew it was a lie, a small one - but he had to understand that it had truly happened. 

“And it wasn’t Crookshanks?”

“He’d been locked in the laundry both times.”

_ It could have been your own forgetfulness the first time though, couldn’t it? _

Harry nodded. “Alright.” He stared wide-eyed for a second, then found himself. “We need to move, get you to the Ministry.”

“I’ll grab a few things-”

“Hermione.” The urgency in his voice demanded her attention, as his eyes found hers. “This is a crime scene.” 

She looked around her flat in horror as it dawned on her. Of course it was. Her chin dimpled as she forced panic down. She’d tried so hard to make it cozy, with photos and blankets and soft furniture - to make it feel safe and warm like her home with Mum and Dad had once been. 

This home was a crime scene now. Where she’d been-

_ -panted over- _

“Let’s get Crookshanks and go.” He said it as a concession, but the urgency remained. 

She felt numb detachment and darted through to her bedroom to sweep up the protesting half-kneazle. When they stepped through the floo, Crooks let out a squeak from how tight she clutched him to her chest.

\---------------------------------

_ She whimpered between short breaths as the cotton sheets crinkled under her sliding feet. _

_ “Shall I sweeten this pain, my witch-” _

“STOP.” Hermione couldn’t stifle her panic.

The St Mungo’s healer - a woman with dark skin and cropped black hair - came back into focus in the seat before Hermione, withdrawing away from her mind. She nodded with a sympathetic look and offered Hermione a glass of water. It trembled in her grasp as she took a sip.

“Take all the time you need.”

Hermione put her hand on her forehead and realized with some gratitude that she was at least not red in the face. She steeled herself again and looked back at the healer, who had lowered her wand into her lap.

“It was after that that I- that the letter organizer was knocked over. And that’s all I can remember.” Hermione fidgeted with the pocket of her jeans and relaxed her shoulders. She needed to think about something else - anything else - and looked at the parchment in front of the healer. “Are those the results?”

The healer nodded. “You aren’t pregnant from the first encounter, and the contraception spell we did earlier will cover you for last night. You don’t have sexually transmitted diseases, but we’ll give you healing potions just to be sure.”

_ Diseases from Antonin Dolohov _ . She felt bile sting at her throat as a wave of revulsion hit her stomach.

“You also haven’t been obliviated - we can say that much with certainty.”

Hermione picked at the skin around her nail. “But that doesn’t rule out any other spells, though, does it?”

“No. Especially ones we don’t typically screen for. It may not have been a true memory charm, or it could act in ways that we don’t catch with our sensing spells, especially if what he used was exotic.”

“But it wasn’t obliviation.”

“No, we can be certain of that.” The healer seemed to consider her words. “There are some curse healers in Europe that could be consulted on in this case-”

“No.” Hermione said it reflexively.

“-anonymously.”

Hermione stared at the healer. The woman paused and gave her a moment to speak further, but the silence stretched on so she continued. “A small, non-identifying part of the memory would be provided to them. But if this isn’t something you want to consider, that would also be completely understandable too. It’s up to you. You’re in control, here.”

Hermione looked down to her hands folded in her lap.  _ You helped defeat Voldemort, for goodness sakes. Let Aurors and healers do what they need to.  _

She felt her face again, this time feeling it in a red blush. __

“The second memory, then. Only the beginning, until - before he touches me.”

The healer nodded. “That will be more than enough. If you change your mind, that’s okay too. You just let us know what you need.”

The healer plucked some parchment out of a draw. Silence stretched out between them, disrupted only by the sound of the healer’s quill scratching-

- _ scratching stubble against her cheek, panting hot breath in the crook of her neck as he drove into her _ -

“Could I have a prescription for the contraceptive potion?” Hermione forced out.

The healer glanced up and gave her a long look she couldn’t interpret. “Of course.”

\--------------------------------------------------------------------

Harry brought Hermione back from St Mungos. She couldn’t fault the Aurors - outside the door to her flat, she was allocated a stocky woman with a friendly smile, who introduced herself (but Hermione forgot her name anyway).

“Ravenclaw,” she’d added, “not that it matters.”

The Ravenclaw Auror and Harry had organised for Hermione to stay at Shell Cottage with Fleur and Bill, still safe under the Fidelius charm from the war. Harry gave her a hand collecting up clothes, toiletries and an armful of books to take with her for her temporary stay, navigating around the Aurors investigating the wards.

_ Investigating her home.  _ She kicked herself for the dishes in the sink.

It was good, she admitted to herself, to be staying at Shell Cottage. Fleur and Bill had been informed that Dolohov had broken in, but didn’t ask any further questions once she arrived, except what she’d preferred for dinner that night and whether or not she wanted the Daily Prophet to be delivered (“Normally, we don’t bother anymore,” explained Bill - and Hermione was happy with that). Fleur was warm but seemed to understand that Hermione wanted some peace and quiet, so she was busy outside in the gardens during the day and bought her tea from time to time.

Over the first week, Harry and Ginny came for dinner, sometimes with Molly. When they were all together, everyone left the subject of Dolohov well alone, which Hermione was relieved for. Sometimes, though, Harry would stay later in the evening and talk with her in her room. 

“The Ministry has been working with the Russian MLE,” Harry said, handing her a cup of tea as he sat on the end of her bed. “The bureaucracy was a nightmare, but we also wondered if the Dolohov name made our inquiries slower - they’re like the Malfoys over there, Hermione.”

Hermione scrunched her nose.

“Anyway, they reckon that he’s not in Russia because he’s sold most of his properties except the family estate, but we were able to get some Aurors over there to verify that was the case.” 

She put her book back on the bedside table and gazed at him. “What else were you going to say?” 

“Well,” Harry said. He blew on his tea. “It also looks like he’s still taking on work.”

“What kind?”

“...The unsavoury kind. Torture, murder. We’re not sure that it’s for the money, though - it’s a pittance compared to the rest of his wealth. ” 

She felt her jaw clenching her teeth together and forced herself to relax.  _ So someone could have paid for this _ , she thought.  Her mind recalled back to Dolohov's face again, to the black hair and the gravelly voice. “Can you ask if they can translate Russian from memories?” She asked.

“Did he say something?”

Hermione thought for a few seconds and squirmed on the bed. “Can you just ask, Harry?”

“Of course.” The sound of the waves outside lingered in the room. “I’m sorry, Hermione. Out of all the Death Eaters on the run, he’s the one that we have the most attention on. There’s a lot of resources on this case.”

She heard the words, but didn’t feel them. Like he was comforting someone else, and she should be comforting them too.

\---------

After two weeks, she had read the six books she’d brought with her, even the muggle PTSD book (which she’d slid under the bed once she was finished with it), and had asked Bill to bring some more books home from his work. She walked long hours up and down the beach to pass the hours in the day.

“Take care not to go too far though, Hermione,” Bill had said over lunch one day. “The wards only extend so far.”

In the evenings, however, was when she would be filled with trepidation towards bedtime. 

Twice now, she made her gums bleed brushing her teeth, when she got a flash of Dolohov’s mouth over hers. In the shower, she was careful and ran her hands across her belly and thighs, checking for feelings of fatigue, or deep bruising, sometimes finding herself staring at them in disbelief that they had been pressed and grabbed and under his hands. Hermione also made sure to check over her shoulder in the mirror for any bruising.

She never masturbated.

What she did do, however, was develop an evening ritual that helped her sleep at night:

Say goodnight to everyone.

Check her wand holstered inside her wrist beneath her pajamas.

Ward the room to make her skin itch like hell if someone approached it.

Skip a middle button of her pajamas so she’d know if it had been done up again (it became a flood of relief every morning - to shoot her hand down and find it still open).

Settle Crooks down onto the bed and itch his chin till his purr found a happy trill.

Check her wand was holstered (again).

She even found a charm that made her floorboards creak in one of Bill's books on how pureblood estates were warded against intruders.  _ Purebloods _ , she scoffed.  _ The things they do to one another _ . 

_ Or to me. _

But there were other things she wished she didn’t have to think about, that weren’t a comfort while getting ready for sleep. When she got her period (to her absolute relief), she grabbed her comfortable black knickers, downed an Evening Primrose potion and charmed her water bottle to be piping hot against her belly while she curled up in bed waiting for the dull ache to go down. Then - panic seized her.

What if he finds her like this? Aching and cramping? 

Would the disgust cause him to kill her?

Would the act be even more agonizing?

She rolled back onto her back, slapped the covers down and glowered at the cottage ceiling, willing the thick tears in her eyes to go away. This was absurd. Voldemort was dead, and Antonin fucking  _ Dolohov  _ was somehow becoming more terrifying to her by the day. Her sleep was fitful and she wasn’t even bothering to reply to most letters that found her in the Cottage. She felt so selfish and self-centered.

The pillow pressed down by her head. 

She snapped away.

Crookshanks stood paused with his paw sunk into the pillow, giving her a slow blink, before curling into the crook of her neck. She brought her hand up to him and slid her hands into his ginger fur to focus on the warm feeling of comfort. He smelled like the fireplace.

\-------------

“For how long can a woman be cooped up like a chicken,” Fleur exclaimed over morning tea. Bill had left for work after breakfast and she’d lingered near Hermione by pottering in the kitchen for a while. “You must have things to do! As I must garden, you also must be occupied.”

Hermione had been avoiding her mail pile, but after long days of reading and walking along the shore she was beginning to feel idle. There were only so many times she could help clear Dobby’s grave before she found herself simply standing in front of it, waiting for the weeds to crop up. 

Hermione drummed her fingers on the dining table a few times. “Would you mind if I transfigure the coffee table to a writing desk in my room?” 

Fleur scoffed. “You must! Poor creature. I wish we were keeping you in France, where you would have more to do than watch me cook.” Without asking, Fleur transfigured an unused kitchen shelf to a bookshelf and started floating it into the guest bedroom. “Get more books from your home,” she called over her shoulder. “You helped win a war, Hermione. What shall they do? Say to you ‘no’?”

By lunchtime, Hermione sent Bill’s owl to the Ravenclaw Auror with a letter, writing to ask, then re-writing  _ to tell  _ her that she would be returning to her flat to retrieve some more of her things. 

_ It’s my home, _ she told herself.  _ I don’t need to ask.  _

The returning owl was rather late in the day from the terrible weather, but the Auror said that Hermione’s visit would be no problem at all if she wanted to go tomorrow: the flat was under observation, the managing Aurors had been notified, and - did she want an escort?

“I’ll be there,” Harry said over dinner that night, the rain lashing at the cottage windows. “If you want to go on my lunch break?”

Hermione could have hugged him. 

He was late the next day because the ferocious weather held up his field-work, but she got some take-away lunch for them both. After talking with the Aurors outside, she let herself in and took her time packing books in an extendable trunk Fleur had lent her.  _ That _ spot on the floor still seemed to stare at her, and she avoided the bedroom except to grab her letters, but she felt relieved when Harry arrived - soaked to the bone in rain.

“It doesn’t feel like home as much without books, does it?” She’d said to him. It seemed neurotic to worry about the water he was tracking indoors, so she’d ignored it.

“Never change, Hermione.” He grinned. 

Later that day, she found that there was enough space in the cottage guest room for all the books she packed (but only just). 

Soon, Hermione found herself busy again. She started her mornings by going for long walks up and down the beach, braiding her hair beforehand to keep it from whipping her in the face, then settling down at the writing desk for a day of reading or replying to letters. 

Sometimes in the afternoons, she’d give Fleur a hand in the garden. 

During the day, things felt okay. 

\--------------

_ In her dream, she was lying on her back in a forest of bare winter trees, their twigs and branches knitted together to hang in the sky, rippling like rubbery seaweed. Leaves around her on the forest floor crunched under her hands, but when she brought a fistful to her face, they were ashes of pages that crumbled into sand. The moon, high in the night sky, oscillated slowly between bright and pitch black, strobing Hermione’s vision. _

_ “I’ve found you, little witch.” _

_ Hermione scrambled to her feet, only for calloused hands to snatch her on the shoulders from behind and pull her hard against a body.  _

_ He was painfully warm against her back. _

_ Dolohov’s arms snaked around her from behind and held her tight. One hand drifted down below her belly button as a scratchy cheek pressed against her neck. _

_ “Do you feel it yet?” He pressed her belly. _

_ She clawed at his arms. “Let me go!”  _

_ He laughed in her ear and held her while she thrashed and kicked with abandon. Slowly, she was aware that she was being paralysed by his warmth, and she could barely wriggle. He pressed his mouth against her ear. _

_ “It shall be hard for you, without a birthing amulet.” _

_ Her skin was crawling where the wiry hair on his arms scratched her. The pitch back forest stretched out before them, long breaths of air catching the moonlight in front of her. She felt his cock hard against her. _

_ “You will cut the cord with a spell from your own wand,” he continued. His cock slid between her legs and pressed up against her, and every muscle in her core recoiled. _

_ “You're disgusting,” she spat.  _

_ “Mmmm.” He seemed to ignore her, and buried his nose in her riotous curls. “Do you want to know what I shall do to you if you do not?” _

_ Suddenly, he rocked back and the head of his cock was angled up towards her. She started screaming, but his hand clamped over her mouth and he slipped his fingers in past her lips, until they were sliding past her teeth, down the back of her tongue, into her throat, through her gagging, and his hips snapped forward- _

“Prrrp!” Crookshanks chirped by her ear.

Her eyes snapped open to stare at the cottage ceiling. 

Sweat clung to her like a sickly mist and her back was soaked against the unbearably hot mattress. Crooks gave her a long, squinted look from his spot on the pillow beside her head, and she was so overcome by a sense of gratitude that she wanted to squeeze him to death. She settled with rolling onto her side and crying into his fur. 

“Ugh,” she murmured after a few minutes, wiping her tears away. “You stink like soot, Crooks.”

She swept up the blankets and blasted the bed with a cooling charm, before stalking off to the bathroom to brush her teeth (again), swallow some water (not his fingers) and settle down in bed for another try at some sleep. 

Her stray, undone pajama button was still undone.

\--------------------

“Nightmares,” the St Mungo’s healer nodded again, as she scribbled on parchment. “And you said they started over a week ago?”

Sunlight streamed into the room and onto the carpets, but the golden colour made Hermione feel ill rather than warm.  “Well, they’re not recollections of real… events, I’m certain of it. They don’t take place in my bedroom, and sometimes they have bizarre or unusual things in them,” she replied.

“That sounds uncomfortable.” The healer gave her a sympathetic look. For a few long moments, the muffled sounds of the receptionist outside was the only noise. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” Hermione started. “I’m not sure they’re just nightmares though. He talks about things in these dreams that are true, things I couldn’t possibly know. In one of them, he spoke about birthing amulets, which I’d never heard of before.” 

_ It shall be hard for you, without a birthing amulet. _

A week ago Fleur and Bill had announced their pregnancy, and during the festivities at the Burrow, Hermione had pulled Molly aside to ask about birthing amulets. “ _ Some pureblood families still pass on those things _ ,” she’d said with a smile, “ _ but I’ve never needed them. Fingers crossed for Fleur _ .”

Hermione had needed a walk alone around the Burrow just to calm down.

The healer folded her hands in her lap. “You may be re-experiencing traumatic dreams from the events you’ve been through. But-” she reached her hand out in a reassuring gesture as Hermione opened her mouth, “it’s also very possible that there is interference in other ways. Because he used exotic magic we may have missed something. Would you be happy if I took another look? Just to be sure.”

Just hearing those words made Hermione feel a sense of relief that she was understood, and a sense of dread that her life would never return to normal. 

_ What would my normal be, anyway? _

As the spells were cast, Hermione sat under the glow of golden threads above her which the healer was interpreting. She felt a sense of submission to her circumstances and hoped she’d never be in a St Mungo’s room again after this ordeal. Suddenly, a thought occurred to her. 

“Do witches cut the umbilical cord using their wands? With a spell?”

The healer raised a brow. “Some... older families choose to, yes.”

_ Purebloods, she means _ . Hermione flicked at the corner of her fingernail and it tore at the quick. The healer continued to cast a few further spells, until her forehead dimpled into a frown. 

Hermione’s stomach flipped.

“What is it?”

The healer hesitated. “Have you been anywhere in the last week since we spoke? Anywhere that you might have been unattended?”

“Why?” The word was barely a whisper.

The healer paused again, returning her wand up her sleeve before looking back up. “You’ve recently experienced a Memory Charm event.”

“I’ve been obliviated,” Hermione breathed. “Oh my  _ god _ .”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for making it through the third chapter of my first fanfic! x 
> 
> Any reviews, thoughts or comments are very welcome. I hope that you're well in the world, wherever you are.
> 
> Updates Sundays


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A week prior to Hermione realising, Antonin Dolohov had paid her a visit. Once she knows that his stalking has continued, however, Hermione begins to take matters into her own hands.

**One week earlier**

To Antonin Dolohov’s delight, the little witch was difficult to find.

His first instinct, when he realised she had fled her residence, was pride. She must have resisted the memory-distorting effects of the nightmare curse more than he had expected. As far as he was concerned, this was excellent news. She was far worthier for it.

What was not good news, but rather expected, was the constant presence of two Aurors at her residence that would eventually need to be dealt with. For several days he covertly laboured to replace the flat’s wards with near-identical ones of his own - ones that would accept him, keep his visits discrete from the Ministry and call to him if his witch arrived. 

Then it was a matter of passing the time.

“Please,” the elderly wizard shrieked, crawling away in a long stripe of blood. His robes were sodden and dragged on the marble floor. “What do you want?” 

Antonin found himself sighing over the contracted kill in a Bavarian manor. The whole exercise felt straightforward, or mechanical - like watching the same theater performance again and again. 

They scream. They offer their wealth. They die.

_ What do I want _ , he mused.

The killing curse he threw at the man felt like obligation rather than conquest. 

Even the torture of young women - that delectable pleasure that so rarely arises - felt unexciting. He ended a session with a wayward wife not even half an hour after extracting her confessions of infidelity. She was a norwegian half-blood that wept before he had even taken her, with a shrill, whining voice. Her plain flaxen hair felt limp beneath his hand. 

She was barren to him, sullied and empty and absent of meaning, and he had no interest spending himself inside her.

His father would not have approved of his behaviour. 

_ Torture is a fine art only for the mindful torturer _ , he had said.  _ Or else it is simple butchery _ . 

What  _ did  _ capture his mind, rather, was making arrangements in contemplation of new fatherhood. Using the Daily Prophet, he had compiled a list of his witch’s most accessible friends, in case her acquiescence to motherhood needed to be forced. If she was too belligerent, he had also arranged several suitable places in Russia to keep her until the birth.

It wouldn’t be satisfactory for her to get rid of his child. 

After 8 full days had passed, the flat’s wards reached out to prickle his skin as he was gutting a deer in South East England. Before he went to her, he listened to the birdsong in the forest, and briefly contemplated a desire to hunt her down properly, on foot.

Muggle London would have to do for now, however. 

He cast  _ scourgify  _ for the blood up his arms and Apparated back to his perch on top of the block opposite her flat, where he was immediately hit with rain. Down below, his witch also stood out in the downpour with a trunk alongside her. 

_ How small _ , he thought.  _ Almost like a bird. _

One Auror spoke with her as the other walked up into the flat to do a walkthrough, returning down to the street outside. He’d placed a suspended sleeping hex on each of them earlier that day, as he did each morning. They eventually settled back to their undercover positions on the street as homeless muggle filth. 

His witch seemed to wait a few minutes, checking the timepiece on her wrist several times and holding her coat tight against herself in the rain.

Eventually, she let herself in.

“My,” he said softly, to himself. “Alone?”

He held himself back, ensuring that the Aurors collapsed unnoticed into sleep on his command, then turned his attention to watching her through her living room window. She was staring at the floor where he first took her. 

It seemed proper to join her.

———-

“Harry!” she called out after he shut the front door. “You got away early!”

_ Ah. _ They would be expecting Potter, then. He threw up a temporary silencing spell across the residence and followed her voice up the stairs. 

“I got us lunch,” she continued. 

The sound of crinkling plastic, that loathsome muggle invention, echoed down the stairway from her living room. 

With her back to him, he reflected that she was still rather short when she was standing, and the spine of her neck caught the light gently as she leaned over a stack of books. He took only a few steps towards her before she turned to face him. Her open expression snapped into terror and she lurched backwards.

“ _ Stupef _ -”

He disarmed her with a flick of his wand. 

“Get away from me!” 

He’d stalked her towards a corner and she threw a book at him while scrambling backwards.

Magic was violent, but the intimate physicality of laying his hands on her was irresistible. He advanced on her and forced her to the ground with his hands. Her nails scored across his neck when she went down, and she only started to scream when she was writhing beneath him.

The ear-piercing scream almost made him breathless.

“When is Potter due?” He clamped one hand over her mouth. The other hand pinned her wrists above her head and he leaned down to gaze into her eyes. They held such loathing blackness in the nights that he had visited, but in the light of day showed warm browns that reminded him of fine antique hardwoods. 

She still tried to scream through his hand, then settled for panting and flicked her gaze to the window. The sound of the street below continued with indifference to her terror. 

“They won’t hear you,” he said simply. He felt a sense of satisfaction - of release, that he knew that he would be having her again. “Our intimacy should be private, my witch. When will we be seeing Potter?”

He released her mouth. “You disgust me,” she spat. He raised a brow.

“ _ Crucio _ .” 

This scream was a gorgeous, continuous high pitch that made him long to be inside her, a siren song for his loins. He let the curse stop after a mere few seconds - it would not do well for her health - and she slumped beneath his hands. With a flick of his wand, her muggle garments were left crumpled on the floor, and her legs clamped shut in response beneath him, an indignant cry coming from her lips. Her skin gleamed in the daylight.

“Get off of me!”

He dragged her to her feet, summoning bindings for her wrists, and suspended her on a conjured hook on the wall as she kicked out like a wild animal. Her feet couldn’t touch the floor, and she was taut like a strung up deer, emphasising the dimple of his mark down her chest. 

He wordlessly cast a detection spell to find that she wasn’t yet pregnant. 

There was an aching hunger deep in his loins that longed to change that.  _ How remarkable,  _ he thought, surveying her writhing figure as she shouted,  _ that this body shall yield a child for me.  _ His ravenous gaze drifted up over her body to the scars that spelled  _ Mudblood  _ on her forearm. 

“Distasteful,” he decided. “Bellatrix always was uncouth.”

The act itself was exquisite. He left his clothes on, taking her against the wall, and she screamed and thrashed as best she could - far more persistently than most. His ears would be ringing all afternoon. 

He delighted in the rubbery flexibility of her hips and legs that very young women still enjoyed, pressing her apart through her frantic kicking. But it was her scarlet blood in the full light of day that made him sigh into her ear, made the muscles deep inside him heave and twinge. There was nothing like it; it was sacred, and slippery, and screamed of death and life and the pleasures between that made his stomach tight. The distress on her face was lovely, but looking down where he fucked into her was enrapturing.

Her cries only yielded when he slid his fingers down to her sex and rolled his fingers across the pearl of her nerves, transforming her screams into suppressed sobs.

“Why are you doing this?” Her voice trembled and her eyes were squeezed shut, swollen and red from tears. 

“This?” He pressed his fingers across her clit again and she jolted with a whimper. “It makes you weep.”

_ It also opens you up for me, my witch. Like a lock to a key. _

He was initially loath to take this pleasure so quickly, with the threat of Harry Potter’s arrival hanging over him, but the faster he went, and the more she cried, the more his body screamed at him to drive into her tight warmth and leave himself there. Once he felt her fluttering climax around himself, she gave way to uncontained sobbing. He lost any sense of reason or pace. 

With the tensing of his belly, he rolled back and forward deep inside, hard against her end that pressed back against him, and spent himself to a perfect symphony of her agonized, stuttering gasps.

It was divine.

Eventually, the thunderous roar of hot blood in his ears settled down. His heart began to still. Her sobs had stilled into occasional hiccuping sniffs, which felt like lovely little shudders against his chest. 

The hunting instinct that had clawed at him all week had become silent, and there was a faint, but distant, hum in his ears. His mind drifted briefly and he reflected on the debilitating pregnancies through his mother’s line - morning sicknesses that had faded them to waifs, ached their bones, and driven their magic to flare erratically. 

It truly would agonize her. Still feeling an occasional twitch inside her as she wept, he slid his arms around her in an embrace and idly rubbed a circle in her back.

“Don’t-!” She begged. “Don’t touch me.”

He sighed, gently slipping out from her and guiding her legs to fall shut, and rested against her on the wall for a silent moment. She smelled of blood, sweat, himself and clean soap. 

“You’ve become difficult to find, my witch. Where do you set your pillow down for the night?”

For a long minute she merely panted. Eventually she steeled herself into slow breaths and found her voice, staring outside the window. “I refuse to talk to you.”

He knew, at the very least, that she would be somewhere protected by the Fidelius charm. Questioning her would be gratuitous and ultimately futile - something he would have indulged in, if circumstances had allowed it. 

He hummed in her ear and slid a hand between her legs, to smear the bloody, slick mess along her skin. She jolted. “A shame. I could leave you torn this time. Then you might know I had come to visit.”

“You hateful,  _ repulsive _ brute.” Rage trembled her voice.

“Are you not fearful I shall kill you?” He stepped back and ran the tip of his wand down the center of her belly. The scarlet down her thighs was unbearably beautiful. “It would be simple to butcher you here. The Aurors would fret over your lovely corpse.” 

He slid his cock back into his trousers and walked over to her bag. “But I will not. Such a waste it would be.  _ Accio contraceptive potion _ .”

A golden potion clinked against the contents of her bag on its way to leap into his hand. “You  _ evil  _ man,” she whispered. Her glowering red eyes were glossy. 

“Tut tut.” He spelled the potion to rapidly heat then cool, to denature it, then dropped it back in her bag. “It is unnatural to neuter yourself.”

“Your pathetic ‘Dark Lord’ would roll in his grave if he saw-”

“Rather, it is Mudbloods that are pathetic.” Antonin stalked back to stare down at her, his black cloak hissing on the wooden floor beneath him, and he thought for a few seconds. “But have you never wondered about your own blood?”

“My muggle parents?” Her scathing disbelief flickered irritation in him.

“Muggles alone could not have made you. They are beasts, which you are  _ not _ .” 

“I would know my own ancestry, you vile man.”

He slid his hand up into her curls at the back of her head and squeezed until she gasped. “I would not spend myself inside you and leave you  _ breathing  _ if you truly were a Mudblood.” His tone was sharp. She glowered out the window without reply, so he decided to conclude his visit, as it was not good to tempt fate with Potter’s arrival. 

He held the tip of his wand to his temple, focusing on the image of her in his mind as she was before him - panting, sweating, flushed and soft under his hands. 

“ _ Irretium somnio _ ,” he murmured. 

A long, purple thread streamed out from his temple, writhing into the air. As he pulled it longer, towards her, it probed forward in hungry twitches. Her head snapped backwards into the wall, as anger slipped back into fearfulness. 

“Another heirloom curse, my witch,” he said. “It will join our dreams at night.”

And, with any luck, help sate his bloodlust. He wasn’t interested waiting weeks at a time to have her. The purple coil found her temple and slithered home. She recoiled before returning his gaze with renewed vitriol.

“You will rot in Azkaban for the rest of your sorry, miserable life.”

He barely acknowledged her. Lifting his wand to her temple, he gazed into her eyes, feeling a need to see the death of this memory, the glassy stare as a part of her slipped away, as she had once done to him.

“ _ Obliviate. _ ”

Although his interference today with her memory would be obvious to a healer, he could also slip some scattered, subtle instincts into her that would be far harder to notice and be wary of. After replacing the memory of his visit with one of leisurely book-stacking, he buried within her a mistrustful instinct for being restricted in her movements. He also amplified an already existing restlessness that she was feeling, which he sensed with satisfaction ( _ good girl _ ). 

Perhaps that was too much. Any more interference would show he had touched more than a single memory episode, but at least those instincts afforded him the next opportunity to hunt her down. He would savour to see how she evaded him next, and his mind wandered to consider how many times he would have to capture her to make her heavy with his child.

A beautiful audition for fatherhood. 

As a finishing touch, and with a possessive compulsion that he could no longer suppress, he set inside her a desire to keep her hair braided. 

_ Braided hair makes a witch more ready to carry _ , his mother had explained to him as a boy at her feet. 

A small family superstition.

\---------------------

**One week Later**

Hermione went to collect herself in the bathroom as St Mungo’s called the Aurors. 

“A Memory Charm event,” the healer had explained before she darted off, “would mean an additional event recently, yes. Not an exotic spell, but true obliviation.”

It was more than she could take. Hermione cried blindly into fistfuls of toilet paper and suppressed the worst of her sobs for the sake of her dignity. Eventually, she heard the bathroom door click open and her healer passed some facial tissues beneath the stall.

“They’re easier on the skin,” the healer had offered, and left the bathroom again without another word. 

Hermione heard the pity in her voice with searing clarity. 

Something about it struck rage inside of her, had transformed the terror she was feeling into something burning hot. She was being hunted, being watched, and nobody had been able to prevent it. The healer had seen to her, the Aurors had helped organise Shell Cottage, the MLE had made it’s Russian inquiries - but it  _ still happened _ . She felt a welling, determined fury. 

How  _ dare _ she not remember what had happened. 

How  _ dare _ this happen in the first place.

How  _ dare _ Atonin Dolohov.

She glared at the tissues in her hand which trembled in her grasp, and she wondered if she was shaking more from fury or from fear. 

The muffled voices of the Ravenclaw Auror speaking with the healer carried into the bathroom from outside, and Hermione realised they were lingering out there for her. With a cooling charm on her face, she tried to get rid of the red puffiness in her eyes. Some stray curls had bounced out of her braid and she tucked them back in.

Eventually, she found herself back in the healer’s office, no longer stifling tears but immense frustration. She knew it wasn’t their fault, but she felt a loose sense of anger that was flying at large like a Hungarian Horntail baying for blood. 

“I want the Russian parts of my memories extracted and translated.” Hermione felt her gaze grow firm, and she turned to the Ravenclaw Auror. “Today.”

“We’ll organise that.”

“And I’d like another contraceptive potion,” Hermione continued.

Both the women in front of her were still. “That,” the healer said, “might be a good idea.”

Hermione pulled out the contraception potion she had in her handbag and placed it on the healer’s desk. “I want this one analysed, just to be sure. And I want to give an update each day on the... symptoms I might be experiencing,” Hermione decided, looking at her healer, who nodded. “I’m most concerned about my health as a priority. We can talk more tomorrow about my case, but I - I just want to be alone right now.”

_ Or with Crooks, anyway. _

The Auror seemed to understand and started talking about things that felt futile: another interview, another statement, reviewing her accommodation. Ways forward. 

_ When did you start relying on Aurors all of a sudden, Hermione? _

_ They hardly helped with Voldemort.  _

The healer gave her another round of tests and potions to take, to ensure her health, and promised that they would talk further the following day. Before leaving to be chaperoned back to Shell Cottage, Hermione turned back to the healer and bit her lip. “I’m so sorry to say this, but - I don’t actually remember your name.”

The healer told her but by the time she arrived home she’d forgotten.

It unnerved her.

\-----------------------

On her bed at Shell Cottage, Hermione resolved to keep a diary of her experiences. She would also meet her healer each morning at St Mungo’s for an update, even if there was no news to report.

_ And write down her name next time, for goodness sake. _

She would also continue to leave one button purposefully undone in her pajamas before bed and get a full panel of tests with her healer if she woke to find her buttons all done up. 

No exceptions. 

Her memory could not be trusted. This wasn’t about  _ feeling  _ safe, anymore. She needed a system that operated independent of her instincts or her memories. It was about  _ being  _ safe.

Fleur was in the garden, so Hermione could wordlessly find Crooks in the living room without having to feel ashamed of her angry tears. She flopped down on her bed with him protesting in her arms and held him tight. He smelled of beach grass. Outside, the wind whipped the sand up into the air, soaring it down the beach. For the first time, Shell Cottage truly felt like a cage: to keep something out (- _ keep him out of your body- _ ), and to keep herself in. But Bill had said not to walk far because she could accidentally stray past the wards, didn’t he? And hadn’t she taken a walk around the Burrow on her own during Bill and Fleur’s baby announcement?

_ Did I do this to myself? _

She tucked her legs close underneath her and fidgeted with her wand. Nothing around her room had changed, but that didn’t mean anything anymore. And there was nothing to say that she hadn’t shown Dolohov Shell Cottage just as she’d led Yaxley to 12 Grimmauld Place.

_ Fleur is pregnant, Hermione. Are you going to lead Dolohov to her, too? _

Her stomach roiled. Fleur was bent over garden plots outside with her hat flapping in the wind, and Hermione resisted the urge to drag her inside and shake her.

Looking devastated, Harry arrived not even an hour later with a Ministry letter in hand. She met him by the fireplace and for a few long moments they didn’t say anything to one another. She felt weary at her urge to comfort him. 

“I can’t talk about it today, okay?” She blurted out. He closed his mouth and nodded. “I need to just think about things for a bit.”

“Of course.”

Hermione rolled the end of her braid between her fingers. It was becoming a new nervous tic, she thought. She needed to  _ do  _ something, to make something happen. “Is there an Auror library?”

“Yeah… Yeah, there is. What do you need?”

“Anything on Russian magic. Dream magic. And - I’ll write you a list later.”

She reached out for the Ministry letter in Harry’s hand and read it with bated breath. It held a long discussion of translator notes, headed by the main translations at the top:

  * [First memory fragment] _“Do you want my children buried up inside you, little witch? Could you bear it?”_
  * [Second memory fragment] Obfuscation chant [?] - conjugation unclear - root word: to hide, to disguise.



Hermione’s blood felt like ice shooting through her veins. The translators could not have known, but the second memory, his low murmuring, was when he had his hand placed on her belly below the navel. 

The letter also stated that her contraception potion “had been neutralised and was not effective.” 

“Had been neutralised.” 

The passive tense of that statement disguised the true horror of it, Hermione noted bitterly. As if the potion had slipped and had an accident, or simply forgot how to do its job properly. 

It should have read, “Antonin Dolohov has rendered your contraception potion useless.” It could even have read, “Antonin Dolohov has likely raped you while you have been able to become pregnant.”

She felt her slow breathing and heard it like it wasn’t hers. Like she was just a body in the room near to her, making noise for her to hear, with a beating heart and prickled skin, and a body that Antonin Dolohov had put himself inside of. 

She wanted to rip the Ministry letter and scatter it in the wind outside. Instead, she folded it in her hand and slid it into her PTSD book (as if to hide its indecency), looking up at a stricken Harry.

“Can you chaperone me into Muggle London this afternoon?” 

“Yeah,” Harry said immediately. “Whatever you need.” 

Later that day, Hermione found out that Harry had apparently never been to a muggle doctor before, which briefly drew Hermione's attention away from being raped and towards the Dursleys lack of competent parenting. Once they were sitting down with the doctor, going through preliminary questions on sexual health, Harry’s ears started to go pink when she assumed that the two of them were an item.

“And are you using protection?” She looked down at Hermione and Harry over her glasses.

Hermione gave a curt shake of the head as Harry squirmed. The GP raised a brow and sent Hermione to take a pregnancy test in the loo. When she came back, Harry was fidgeting with a brochure on safe sex.

“You’re not pregnant.” The GP smiled, taking her gloves off and disposing of the test. “But make sure you play safe, okay? You’re only-,” she checked her clipboard, “-eighteen, much too young for kids just yet. Will you be needing condoms?”

Hermione maintained a calm demeanor but couldn’t stop her jaw clenching, and once she had the prescription printouts in hand, she resisted the urge to slam the door behind them. She stalked out of the GP practice with Harry trailing behind her in what she sensed was careful silence.

Once they found a chemist, Hermione grabbed as many muggle pregnancy tests that would fit in both her hands, tumbling them over the counter to buy with the rest of her prescriptions. 

Muggle contraceptives. Muggle morning-after pill. Muggle pregnancy tests. 

All things that a pureblood rapist wouldn’t understand or know to interfere with. 

Antonin Dolohov could burn in hell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again for following another chapter of my first fic! 
> 
> As always, your thoughts and comments are very welcome and I read/reply to each one. 
> 
> Hope you're well, wherever you are xx


	5. Chapter 5

_ She gently scored her fingernails along the rippling canvas. If Hermione died before seeing the inside of this tent again, it would be too soon.  _

_ She wondered what had happened to it, left out in the Forest of Dean. Did it collect leaves? Did it billow apart in a gust of wind? Or would an unsuspecting Muggle one day find themselves obliviated by a Ministry Auror after trying to sell it in a newspaper ad? She bent down to pick up a knocked-over lamp and remembered how Harry would- _

_ Leaves crunched outside. _

_ “Is this how you hid from us, little one?” Dolohov’s accented voice said from outside.  _

Oh no.

_ She was rooted to the spot. Her mouth dried up and she barely dared to even turn her head. He was close enough that she heard him shifting his weight on the leaves on the other side of the canvas beside her. _

_ Suddenly the canvas rippled and slithered apart on the other side of the tent, making a tight slit that she couldn’t see through. She padded over with bated breath, away from Dolohov’s voice, and squeezed through to find herself- _

_ In an unfamiliar forest. The absence of undergrowth stretched as far as the eye could see, punctuated only by huge trees with coiled, black bark, and the occasional boulder. Too sparse to hide. _

_ She looked down to her feet to see vines wriggling up her legs. On instinct, she bolted and heard him start behind her. _

No, no, no!

_ She knew how this ended.  _

_ Every night, now, she knew how this ended, but she ran anyway, and he ran her down. _

_ He caught her by the hair this time. _

_ “I hate you,” she screamed as he dragged her from her underarms. _

_ “A high compliment.” _

_ “Get out of my head!” _

_ He dragged her to a flattened stone table with illegible runes engraved into it. Invisible ropes lashed her arms down, and she kicked out. The trees had no leaves and swooped high in the sky, black branches against white overcast clouds, like shattered marble. Their rippled bark had runes cut into them as far as the eye could see. _

_ She squeezed her eyes shut. _

_ “My witch,” he said, ripping at her clothes with his hands. He always used his hands to undress her in her dreams - the clothes seemed to tear away like papery chiffon.  _

_ “They say that you have a newfound interest in my mother tongue.”  _

_ She focused on breathing - calm, in and out. A rhythm she could control. That she could center her thoughts on. In and out. _

_ Her legs were flattened on either side and bindings lashed themselves around her knees. _

_ In. Out.  _

_ But the air was cold in her lungs and stung the back of her throat. A hand slid down her collarbone, making her hyperventilation start ( _ -this is when he, how he starts, before he- _ ) and a hateful voice spoke a language of clipped consonants and unfamiliar lilts in her ears as he grasped her hips, and pressed the hot blunt of his cock against her, and snapped  _ in _. _

_ She tried to stifle it but couldn't suppress a short, voiceless cry. _

_ He spoke and he thrust, spoke and thrust - shallow at first, until he knotted his hand in her hair and pulled until her back was arched off the stone. She swallowed her whimpers and held out as long as she could until the grasp in her hair squeezed and her scalp felt like it was being torn from the roots.  _

_ She screamed.  _

_ It was the worst thing to do. _

_ His speech became demanding and breathless, and his thrusts became longer and deeper into her, striking her inside in a way that left an agonising ache as he pulled down on her hair. And then he was pulling and pushing until he lay down across her, their ribs heaving together, a cruel, slick burning between her legs, and he rolled stuttering thrusts deep inside- _

She jolted awake.

Her gaze landed on the cottage ceiling, and she slammed her fist down on the duvet. 

The air was  _ freezing _ . 

She leapt out of bed and slammed the window shut - Crookshanks had been outside all evening, and she hadn’t wanted to shut him out - so now he lay sleeping at the end of her bed letting out little snores, apparently oblivious.

Probably because this was becoming routine, she bitterly thought.

She slipped her fingers down into her underwear, and felt a sickening slick between her folds. Darting into the bathroom, her hands seemed to act independently and without conscious thought - she ripped her pajamas off (stray button still undone), pulled off her knickers, and glared at them, wet but unbloodied.

_ It’s a physiological reaction, Hermione. Like being tickled, or force-fed.  _

_ Isn’t it?  _

She lifted the hot water temperature in the shower and stood under it until her skin scored in red welts.

Time passed. 

The hot water beat down-

Until it didn’t anymore, and she started to towel dried herself off. She felt her legs under her hands and swallowed, hesitating before toweling off further up. She was coming to hate drying off  _ down there. _ It seemed like she was forever checking herself, hating her sensations, second guessing her body. And she’d never noticed how bony the spine of her back was before, but running the towel across it-

_ Spine grinding into the stone as his weight crushed her, and the smell of pine, fresh sweat, and the scent of his skin seeped into her pores- _

She dropped her towel and snapped her hands across her chest, then she tried to steady her breathing, but her hands were slippery around her waist and it felt just like another nightmare she’d had earlier that week when-

-“shhh,”  _ he had whispered into her ear. “An embrace. We fit together, we come apart.” The rain in the dream made him slip up and down across her chest and he slipped his hand up to her ribs and drove his fingers into the hollow where they ended, and she hyperventilated into the rain- _

The cold in the bathroom made her skin prickle into goosebumps. She tried to force down the bile coming up in her throat but she wanted to be sick in the tub, and she just couldn’t concentrate-

But then a kind voice with an accent -a  _ soft _ accent that  _ missed _ the consonants and  _ smoothed _ the vowels - was echoing off the walls of the bathroom and wrapping a blanket around her and passing Hermione her pajamas.

Then it was coaxing her to a warm bundle of cushions on the sofa. 

And when a hot water bottle found its way into her lap, she clasped it tight and found herself in the soft sounds of waves and the homely smell of fresh clipped rosemary and fairynettle drying in the hanging nets of the cottage kitchen. 

The soft voice asked Hermione to choose a nail polish, so she thought (out loud),  _ but it’s still nighttime. _

“Yes,” said Fleur, and Hermione looked into her face. It was still puffy and had sleep in her eyes, and it squinted a little in the light - but it still wore her haughty sternness. “So we’ll show Bill our nice nails in the morning, won’t we?”

\----------

Hermione woke on the couch with a sore neck and shiny, peach-toned nails that glossed in the light at the breakfast table.

“A classic colour,” Fleur had explained to Bill, and that was the only explanation he got. 

Hermione couldn’t put her gratitude into words. She was coming to accept her belligerent kindness, in a way, and it made the morning feel kinder. But when she was alone in her room, starting her morning ritual (Fuck!  _ Buttons all done up, underwear nowhere to be seen, wand in the shower caddy- _ ) she felt a swirling undercurrent of worry in her stomach. 

She darted out to the dining table again, and found that Fleur had farewelled Bill and was setting some bread aside to rise for the morning.

“Last night…” Hermione swallowed. 

Could she ask to compare their accounts? Should she speak to Bill instead? How could they even tell if  _ he’d _ been there? Oh god. What if Dolohov-

_ What if I- _

“It was nothing.” Fleur replied with firmness. “Well. Bill had to heat the water halfway through his shower. But it was nothing for me.”

Hermione nodded, but she shifted on her feet, and Fleur sighed.

“You know, Hermione. My grandmother was captured during Grindelwalds time. They took her for a whole winter. When she returned, my grandfather gave her a false wand - you know this? A wand from a plain tree with no magic?”

“A stick?”

“Yes, a stick. Because she would throw spells in the middle of the night at anyone who came to her.” 

Hermione didn’t know how to reply, but Fleur just gazed thoughtfully out of the window. “Anyway, she stopped one day.”

“What changed?”

“She said time. But my father would say to me that it was love and safety too.” She spelled the countertop free of flour and laid out some flowers, clipping at the stems as she went. “Let me know how the healer is today, yes?” 

———-

“So I haven’t been obliviated again?”

“No,” said the healer, and she dismissed the glowing threads above Hermione. She felt a thrum for relief spread through her chest, and she could finally stop worrying -no,  _ imagining _ \- Dolohov dragging Fleur by her hair and-

“We do have some more good news. We might know what is going on with your nightmares.”

“Tell me,” Hermione said, and she was breathless.

“Well, the nightmares are distinct from the first two episodes you had when you were attacked in your flat, so we worked with the assumption that it was a new spell.”

Hermione knew this; it felt like walking on the same spot. She wished the healer would hurry up.

“A curse healer who consults here in St Mungo’s recognised the symptoms of the curse from an academic text. It causes both parties to share dreams when they are simultaneously asleep.”

Hermione bounced her foot on the floor.

“As he explained,” the healer continued, “it was originally used in the Byzantine Empire for long distance communication between wizards during wars, when owls would be struck down. Although now it’s used for more nefarious reasons-”

“So what can I do about it?” Hermione said. She’d reported to St Mungo’s every morning in uncomfortable detail how her dreams were pervaded by Antonin Dolohov - not an impression of him, or a memory of him, but a living, breathing Dolohov that delighted in taunting her and terrorising her. There was nothing to do but focus on breathing exercises and try desperately to wake up, so far.

But if they knew what the spell was, couldn’t they undo it?

“Based on the standard rate of how fast a witch naturally metabolises Dark Magic, we estimate that the spell would take three months to fade. But-” the healer pre-empted the question on Hermione’s lips, “if you have regular exposure to moonlight, then it comes down to two or three lunar cycles.”

Moonlight. 

Hermione could do that easily. The cottage had huge windows in front of the sofa she could bundle up on. Suddenly there was a limit to the fitful sleep she was getting, and a way for her to control it.

“If I sleep at a different time to Dolohov, I could also - prevent us sharing dreams, is that correct?”

“In theory, yes.”

Hermione fidgeted with an earring. She could do this. There was an end in sight. The lack of sleep was the hardest thing for her at the moment, with the repetitive disruptions during the night, but she was determined to at least gain her normal back. Then she could focus on making sure that if he tried physically finding her while she slept, he couldn’t do what he did to her in the flat again - paralyse her and -

\- and touch her body again.

“Has anyone made progress on what kind of curse he first used on me, in my flat?” Hermione asked. She was becoming more familiar with how the healer silently showed discomfort - refolding her ankles, or lining up her quill and parchment. Today, she smoothed the sleeve of her robe.

“We haven’t found anyone who is able to take your case just yet.”

Hermione’s eyes narrowed. “Who is able to? Or who is  _ prepared _ to?”

The healer shifted in her seat. “The Dolohovs are an older family. Magical communities are somewhat more insular and smaller in Eastern Europe and Russia, so it’s taking some time to find a good fit for your case.”

What was it that Harry had said? That the Dolohovs were like Malfoys back in Russia? 

“Look - could you arrange to have another memory fragment translated?” Hermione forced out. She had to focus her concentration elsewhere, and move things forward, even if nobody else was.

“Of course. But, Hermione,” said the healer, and she held her hand out in a gesture of reassurance, but Hermione needed open space - not a kind healer and dead ends in a lonely office.

“I need to go.”

———

That night she didn’t let herself sleep. 

If the shared nightmares required that they sleep at the same time, then Hermione would make sure she would catch naps and sleep at times he would be unlikely to rest - during the days. It would be hard to shift her sleep patterns to the days, but the idea of uninterrupted sleep was plainly exciting to her now. 

When she explained this to her hosts, Bill was understanding and Fleur said she’d miss her during the days, but was glad to be there if she woke suddenly and needed company. 

_ It’s only a matter of time before he figures my sleep cycle out. _

_ But what else can I do? _

Since the healer had explained how moonlight would help, she had formed a calendar of the moon cycle. The moon was hidden behind the clouds, but she sat by the window anyway, with Crookshanks at her feet. It was lonely being awake at night in the dark. The garden was still outside and the pitch black swooped on as far as the eye could see - still and unshifting.

Bill’s snore carried out from the bedroom. 

It was hard to keep awake, and she felt restless, but she knew she shouldn’t go outside, so she did stretches in the living room. Starting from her arms, her back and legs, and back up to stretch her neck - they felt more and more like they were  _ hers _ again. Not simply something she occupied. 

There was only one thing that kept tugging at her mind: she really needed to get out of the house. Have a long walk. Stretch her legs properly. Harry might know a safe way to stretch her legs, she thought.

She waited with a thumping headache until the sun came up, and ducked off to bed. For the first time in many nights, she slept undisturbed. 

———

“Do muggle contraception and magical contraception interfere with each other?” It was the end of their session the following day (they’d shifted their appointments to late afternoons), and Hermione thought to ask her healer about something that had occurred to her. She’d gotten through her first tray of muggle oral contraceptives, and she was carrying around the old potion for show, but she remained curious. 

“I’m not sure that’s been researched very much.” The healer didn’t look up from packing away her notes. 

_ Typical. _

“Why?”

“Well,” the healer replied, and her tone was patient. “Magical contraception is typically preferred by magical folk. They don’t have the side effects that muggles report.” 

“What’s the mechanism - how do the magical contraceptives work?”

“With the soul of a person, by preventing the formation of a new soul. That’s how we test for pregnancy too - for a new soul.”

Hermione drummed her finger on the armrest of her chair. “Would a spell trying to hide pregnancy just be disguising the presence of a new soul?” 

The healer gave her a long look. “If someone were trying to hide a pregnancy from magical detection, then yes.”

“But not muggle detection.”

“It doesn’t physically change anything in the body, if that was your question.”

Something inside Hermione felt hopeful. 

That afternoon, she did another muggle pregnancy test at home which came up negative. It had been over two weeks since the beginning of the shared nightmares (and presumably the Memory Charm event), so she was feeling better each day. 

She even let Fleur do a pregnancy test.

“Huh,” Fleur smiled, holding the stick up to the light. “The muggle test works!”

Hermione rolled her eyes behind her.

———-

Later that evening, Harry sat at the end of the bed; Hermione at her writing desk. It was becoming their routine. 

She was avoiding the Ravenclaw Auror, too frustrated that none of their inquiries had led them closer to apprehending Dolohov, so the Auror’s Office seemed to accept that Harry should be the one to work with her instead. So there they sat: Harry desperately hunting for answers and reporting back apologies, Hermione pouring over books on her writing desk. 

This time, he’d brought in tea from the kitchen and wordlessly handed over the translation letter for the most recent dream fragment she’d left with the healer. From that dream in the forest, outside the tent. 

The letter trembled in her hand. 

_ Intimacy is supposed to be private, witch. The poor translator that hears my voice in your ear shall find themselves sorry for it. How many more shall you condemn? Shall I tell them how you feel when you tear apart for me? Oh- how you twitch and weep beneath me? That your blood, your slippery blood- _

Hermione flipped the letter over face down on her desk with a slam, feeling her face blush a furious red. 

His lewd descriptions reached depravity she couldn’t have imagined, and had gone on for several paragraphs. It even required translator notes for several statements that had no english equivalent. The translator would be under no false pretenses as to exactly what Dolohov was doing to her.

“How did he find out about the translations, Harry?” Her voice held a sharpness she knew was unwarranted - it wasn’t Harry’s fault, but it was  _ someone’s _ .

“The translator is an Auror with one Russian parent. She said she’d only talked to her husband and her mother about the work, who both swear they haven’t told anyone.” Harry looked grim. “The Auror has been stood down and we’ve retained another translator in the Ministry.”

“My privacy,” she started thinking, but the words fell from her lips anyway, and there was nothing to add once she’d said it, so she rolled the end of her braid between her fingers.

Harry looked pained. He came over and leaned down to hug her, but pulled away.

“What?” Hermione turned to him. “What is it?”

“I thought you might - you know.”

“No?” 

He shifted on his feet. “Appreciate some personal space.”

“From you, Harry?  _ No _ . You’ve done nothing wrong. And there isn’t anything wrong with  _ me _ , either.” It was the first time she really felt the edges crumbling in front of Harry through this ordeal - she couldn’t suppress a gasping sob and brought her hands up to cover her face, and her eyes stung furiously. “A hug would have been really,  _ really nice _ .” 

She felt a gentle hand on her shoulder, then an arm softly tuck around her back, and her shoulders shuddered when the grief washed over her. She stood up and hugged him back.

“I miss my mum,” she sniffed into Harry’s jumper, and she hated how squeaky and girlish she sounded, hated the misery in her own voice. “I miss my dad, too, but I really want my mum.” 

She closed her eyes and cried, and a few minutes ticked by like that until Crookshanks meowed at her feet, so they pulled apart. Harry held her shoulders and gazed at her. 

“Hermione, I’ve been thinking.”

“What?” 

“Is there anything you want to do but you can’t? Anything that I’m able to do because I’m with the Aurors but you wish you could do?”

Hermione sniffed. “Durmstrang won’t answer my owls.”  _ Because I’m Muggleborn, probably.  _ Hermione had thought of writing under an alias first, but had hoped they wouldn’t be difficult, especially given her role in the winning side of the war.

“What do you want from Durmstrang?” 

“Well,” said Hermione, and she turned to pull a parchment sheet of her notes from the desk draw, “they have enchantments on all their sleeping quarters to protect against ‘nightmares and interference during sleep’, according to one of Bill’s books. They’re old historic wards so I can’t find a record explaining them anywhere. But they might help.”

“That’s a good idea.” Harry nodded. “I can do that. I’ll arrange for the Aurors office to ask.”

“And I’m worried about Fleur and Bill.” She heaved in another sniff, and pulled a tissue out from her bedside cabinet. She was burning through them and had to re-transfigure a batch every morning. 

“For their safety?”

“I need them to understand just what’s happening, because they probably - they seem to feel safe right now. Can you come over for dinner tonight?”

“Yeah, of course.” He didn’t seem to follow, but he nodded anyway.

“Fleur is pregnant, Harry. And she’s got Veela blood, so if Dolohov finds her too-“ she said, but her throat constricted so she swallowed. “This is dangerous for them. I might need you to find another safe house, because it could be really dangerous for her.”

“Probably no worse than with Voldemort, you know,” he said. 

And that was the first thing that flew out of Fleur’s mouth that evening over chicken roast. 

“Also, you? Moving house? I think not,” Fleur had interrupted her for the second time. It was not going well for Hermione. “The charm on this house kept away Voldemort - so it will keep away whatever horrible men he has left behind!”

Harry gave Hermione a long, cautious look.

“I haven’t known where the Fidelius Charm ends around the cottage.” Hermione forced herself to take a sip of water to calm her nerves. “I could have been… attacked here while I was walking. During the day.”

Fleur huffed. “I’m used to seeing you from the garden. Or on the beach. You know, I would notice - no, truly, Hermione, I would.”

Hermione chewed her chicken with such nervous energy she bit her cheek and winced. Harry looked very intently at his potatoes. The only sounds for a few moments were the clinking from everyone’s plates, except for Fleur who had set her cutlery down.

“I’ll have stones placed at the ward parameters,” Bill spoke up, looking between Fleur and Hermione. “Would that be helpful?”

It gave her pause for thought. “I would really appreciate that,” Hermione said. “But, Fleur, you’ll have to be careful too.”

“Of course,” she said, and her hand went to her belly. She wasn’t showing yet, but the motion reminded Hermione that Fleur was becoming a mother soon. 

Hermione started eating again with an ill sense of caution, and a few moments passed in silence. Fleur seemed to notice the tension, so she picked up both the cutlery and the conversation with a determination to settle the mood. 

“You know. At Beauxbatons there were two Briton boys, brothers. How can the Britons be so strange? They were always caught sneaking...”

And as the chatter over dinner carried on, the tension melted away. Harry passed on Ginny’s regards before heading off and Bill said to wake them if she needed anything through the night.

Hermione felt calm again until she had put her pajamas on and got ready to sleep once the morning sun broke. It was a long, lonesome night and she desperately had wanted to go for a walk.

She thought about it.

She didn’t. 

But she really wanted to.

Sleep came for her quickly and she was hopeful it would be another full, undisturbed night.

———

On her back, she thrashed beneath the swirling water, ice cold against her skin except for the warm body between her legs-

She kicked and tried to scramble back, clawing at the sand beneath her, and the salt water swept back out to sea, finally letting her breathe. She looked up at the naked form of Antonin Dolohov above her.

He was a menace. She’d never seen his full form like this, in the full light of day, but his wiry hair and scars marked him into a hideous looming monster. Salt water beaded on his pale skin. His hands pinned her hips down into the soft sand, but his black eyes gazed past her in the distance, along the sandy horizon. 

She took in a laboured breath and tried to seize the moment of his inattention, but she couldn’t get out from his grasp. Yet he didn’t advance, merely pinning her to her place. 

It was the first time that he’d caught her in her dreams, run her down, and lingered over her, had been slow with his violence. It felt mocking. As if he was taking a languid stroll in the afternoon, taking his time to enjoy her agony and humiliation with such casualness that he would simply pin her down and wait for her to lose her energy by writhing and struggling.

Fury bubbled inside her, thrashing with futility beneath his hands and his body, and she couldn’t bear to keep it in any longer. 

“You are disgusting.”

His eyes slid down to her from the horizon.

“You are in Cornwall,” he said. “Aren’t you?”

The shock ripped her from sleep.

Outside, Fleur sang in the garden. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again! Thank you everyone for following along with this story. Thoughts, comments and reviews are very welcome. I read and reply to each one. x
> 
> You are also solemnly invited to pester me on [tumblr](https://small-miriam.tumblr.com/)


	6. Chapter 6

“Hermione, he is just a muggle.”

Fleur’s voice was quiet and imploring in the kitchen, holding her dressing gown tight around herself. Outside under the starry night sky, the Aurors stood before a balding man holding a labrador on a leash. 

Earlier that night (or was it technically early morning?) Hermione had accidentally drifted asleep on the sofa trying to get some moonlight on her skin. Then she saw him.

It was only a black silhouette. A dog roamed ahead. But it was late at night, too late for a muggle to be walking their dog. The figure walked back and forwards along the water line, then had stared back up at the beach - directly at the cottage - and stood still.

_Staring._

She stared back in terror, barely able to move underneath her blanket on the sofa. His figure was not as towering as Dolohov’s out at the ocean, but that meant nothing when a Death Eater had polyjuice potion. 

_Right?_

So when she found her courage, she’d banged on Fleur and Bill’s bedroom, and the girls hid in the room behind Bill. Hermione could see his knuckles tight around his wand and she thought of Lily and James Potter’s last moments. 

The barrage of Aurors and hitwizards had taken four minutes to arrive.

Now, the three of them waited in the kitchen. One Auror walked back into the house from talking with the muggle and approached Hermione. 

“He’s a muggle walking his dog,” he said. 

“This late at night?” Hermione demanded.

“He stayed late at his work, as a sort of muggle building designer. He’s simply walking his dog.”

Behind them, another woman stepped out of the floo and introduced herself as the night shift obliviator before heading outside. Up and down the beach, there were a flurry of cracks as the hitwizards apparated rapidly to clear the area, and the muggle man snapped his head around at the moonlit sky with a bewildered stare. The obliviator snapped her fingers in front of the muggle’s face and raised her wand.

“I couldn’t have known.” Hermione folded her arms and turned back to stare at the Auror. Dolohov had broken into her home. Had hunted her down at least once and obliviated the memory. 

Had realised she was in Cornwall.

“You couldn’t have know.” The Auror agreed.

“I-” Hermione stared back at him. He wore a schooled appearance of patience. Fleur glowered at two wizards who kept their shoes on as they ducked through the house and back to the floo again. 

“I’m sorry.” Hermione’s voice felt small. 

“There’s no need to apologise,” the Auror replied. “We’re happy to help you of all people to get back to normal.”

“Back to normal?”

“Safe.” 

_Me of all people?_

Some witches in Ministry uniforms stepped through the floo, holding bundles of linen cloth and tracking runes. Fleur passed Hermione a hot water bottle and made an effort to herd her towards her bedroom, shielding her from the stream of people that were gradually accumulating in and around the cottage. “Here - lets get you back to sleep.” 

“I won’t sleep.”

Fleur huffed. “Let’s get you into bed, then, and you can read away from prying eyes.”

Hermione gazed at the Aurors outside, the bewildered muggle man, the obliviator, Fleur and Bill in their sleepwear and the hitwizards stalking around out in the night distance. Another pair of Aurors were checking the perimeter of the wards out towards the high tide waterline.

Exactly where he-

_“You are in Cornwall, aren’t you?”_

-Hermione’s hand twisted in her pajama top. 

The muggle man’s gaze was glassy as the obliviator combed through his mind, and Hermione was reminded of what she had permanently taken from her own mum and dad. Several Aurors looked intently at the ground while she walked to her room. 

Her ears were pink in humiliation.

\----------------------------------------------

Against her judgement, she fell asleep.

It was a dream, because she didn’t have her wand and she was in the godforsaken forest again. The boulders wobbled nonsensically when she glared at them.

Over the weeks, screaming at him had been futile. Scathing hatred had been met with quiet amusement. Now, all she felt was far away - as if she were observing the scene from a distance, as if it was happening to someone else. 

Running through this forest would be futile. 

She simply sat on the ground and waited for her sentence to be carried out.

Behind her, leaves crunched under footsteps that gaited towards her at a placid pace, until they stood in silence beside her. She stared resolutely ahead at the forest with rune-scarred trees and mossy boulders - the same one where he had babbled in her ear a horrible threat to the translator. 

“I was taught to hunt here,” a deep voice said above her. A hand slid into her curls from above and his thumb rubbed a circle behind her ear. “As your children may be.”

Her chin crumpled and she brought her hands up to cover her face. She held her breath for as long as she could to stifle her anguish, but when she tried to breathe in, a shuddered gasp gave way to sobs muffled in her hands. 

“There is no shame in your spirit being broken,” he said softly.

The hand snaked around her throat, but she ignored it to continue weeping. She was sick of being strong. _Nothing_ worked. His fingers softly squeezed the cartilage of her airways, then pulled away.

A clink of metal sounded beside Hermione’s ear, and she flinched. 

His cock filled her with a horror that curdled her stomach. A red, angry blur in the corner of her eye, she refused to look at it directly. It wasn’t anatomy. It was a hot weapon that had knifed up into her. A hateful animal that had twitched and writhed in her belly with a mind of its own. 

_Azkaban isn’t enough,_ she thinks distantly. _He needs to be-_

He shifted until his cock was burning warm against her check. 

This was new. If he was foolish enough to put it near her mouth, she could bite down and incite his rage enough to be killed quickly and wake up. As if speaking directly to her thoughts, however, he pressed its length gently against her face - as if to provoke her. 

“Are you tempted to antagonise me, little witch?” 

Her bottom lip was trembling as a thumb slipped into her mouth, then pushed her teeth down to open her jaw. 

“You must be lonely where you are, without your friends.” His accented tone was low and conversational, like when Bill and Fleur would have private chats leaning forward in the cottage sunroom over tea. “Do you think of them? Miss Lovegood gathers fairynettle for her pillowcase each night.”

Suddenly, Hermione felt her pupils constrict into points, and her throat involuntarily swallowed. Her mind conjured the image of Luna wandering the hills around her family home with clipping scissors and a vacant stare. Searching for fairynettle, rather than Dolohov’s silhouette gazing from a distance. 

_Please, no-_

“It is an old witch’s tale, of course, that it keeps away bad luck.” 

He ran his thumb over her bottom teeth. She was the daughter of dentists, carefully brushing them every night even during the horcruxes hunt, and now Dolohov’s bare fingers were sliding around in her mouth. Tears pricked at her eyes. 

“Perhaps it is for her father's sake. He frets at the windows and bites his nails to the flesh. I do wonder sometimes which of us Death Eaters he thinks of.”

Suddenly, Hermione was no longer far away. His hands slid around her head in a firm grasp.

“Wait-"

His cock pushed into her mouth, and the salty, bitter taste along her tongue forced her to gag. It was a fat intrusion that physically _twitched_ in her mouth. Above her, a soft sigh left Dolohov. His cock pressed along the roof of her mouth until it hit the soft back of her throat that she kept tightly closed, and she breathed through her nose. His hand wound tight in the curls at the back of her head. 

“Such tender resistance.”

He dragged her head hard towards him, and his cock slipped into her gagging throat. She slammed her hands against his thigh to push away, to free her airway, but he had an iron grip that held her firm. He fucked her throat with rolling thrusts that caused fitful gagging around himself. Breathing was impossible, and Hermione jolted and yanked her head from side to side with frantic terror as her heart thundered in her chest, but his hands ripped at the roots of her hair to keep him rocking in and out of her spasming throat, with the revolting sound of _gluckgluckgluck_ echoing in her own ears.

“How soft,” he said above her, breathless. 

Thick ropes of spit rolled down her chin while she tried to thrash. Like every other time, he didn’t care for her lack of participation; she was an object that he subdued and pinned and thrusted _into_. 

“Your tender body is so wanting. It cries out for children to be tucked up inside.”

When black spots shimmered her vision, threatening unconsciousness, he pulled back a moment for her to breathe, and she sobbed soft whimpers around his cock. Tears streamed down her cheeks and curls clung to her face as the onslaught started again and she fought for scraps of breath. 

Eventually she heard quiet murmurs above her in a foreign tongue. Dolohov’s hands dragged her close, his hips stuttered and the head of his cock pulsed. The hot, wet sensation that spurted down her throat caught her by such surprise that she almost breathed it in, swallowing only just in time to prevent choking on his semen.

A thick web of saliva stretched from her mouth to his cock when he pulled her away, and a shudder tore through her. The acrid taste of his semen roiled her stomach and she found herself leaning forward on her hands on the forest floor, her mouth wet and her belly tight, ready to be sick. 

She gulped down air in heavy pants. 

She had to tell Harry. Have the Lovegoods taken into protection. 

When a heavy thumb dragged across the spit on her chin, she flinched away and opened her eyes to see him staring down at her. His cheeks had a pink flush and he looked at her in a long, still gaze of icy grey eyes. 

“That act is for whores and traitors.” He snaked his hand around her neck again. “But not for mothers. And never for witches with child. We shall never truly do it outside of dreams, despite how beautiful you feel here.” Again, he rolled his fingers around the cartilage of her windpipe. He dragged her to her feet and leaned close over her trembling body. 

“I have grown weary of waiting, sweet witch.”

His other hand slammed around her neck, and his grip crumpled her throat, until-

-She woke with a whimper and was sick on the wooden floors.

—————————————-

“I have some bad news.”

Harry clutched several letters tightly in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. He shifted on his feet at her bedroom door until she ushered him in.

“Is it-” Hermione flinched, “Luna?”

“No. Not Luna.” He sat at the foot of her bed and passed her the cup of tea. She sat at the desk again and waited with baited breath.

Harry was the first person she had seen earlier that day, frantic to warn him that the Lovegoods were in danger. The rest of the morning had been spent nervously pacing in her room, unbraiding and rebraiding her hair, squishing Crooks in a tight grasp until he slunk off with a glare, and trying to help Fleur with baking (“Do you prefer to do it the muggle way? I can show you to knead bread properly, of course, but I know your mother is a muggle-”).

And fantasising about going on a long walk. _God_ , she needed a long walk. 

Now, in the warm midday sun streaming through her room, Harry was sitting on her bed with a cautious look. 

“The russian translator we initially retained for this case. Her body was discovered this morning.”

Hermione felt her heart rate climb. 

“Dolohov is our main suspect at this time. She had been—um,” Harry faltered, and the tips of his ears blushed a faint pink colour before he swallowed. “She was found with semen in her mouth. And plant matter, too.”

Hermione’s heart felt like it stuttered in her chest. “Fairynettle.” 

“Yes,” Harry replied slowly. “It was fairynettle.”

She set down the tea with a clunk on the desk and found her hands picking nervously at the curls at the end of her braid. Didn’t Harry say that the translator had a husband and a Russian parent? Who had found her body? She imagined them as Molly was after the battle at Hogwarts, clutching and sobbing at their loved one, only now it was an Auror with-

Semen and fairynettle in her mouth. 

_“This act is for whores and traitors-”_

Her throat swallowed around dry air. 

“How old was she?”

“Hermione.” Harry looked long and hard at her before grasping her arm in a firm grip. “You _know_ that you could have done nothing to stop this.” 

“You can understand how it might not feel that way, though, can’t you?” 

Harry was silent.

She rationally knew that he was right. Dolohov, an ex-Death Eater, was hunting her. Nobody could be expected to walk into the arms of a monster to appease them. Nobody could be the sole custodian of the obligation to stop a hateful murderer.

But that wasn’t true.

_Harry had done it, hadn’t he?_

_Walked to his death in the Forbidden Forest for the lives of others?_

She couldn’t hold his gaze, and picked at her nails in her lap. Dolohov wasn’t the leader of a pureblood death cult, who required a mansion and an army and sweeping displays of power. He was a vindictive needle in a haystack, able to slink in to murder and dissolve back into the background. The Ministry couldn’t find him while he was assassinating victims for sport, and now he was dropping in and out of her life. 

_And he isn’t exactly trying to kill you, is he?_

She felt a flare of guilt as the face of Luna swam into her mind, and Hermione’s hands found a quill on her desk to straighten.

“He’s going to get to the Lovegoods. I know it.” 

Harry sighed. “Luna says she doesn’t want protection.”

“ _No_!” Hermione exclaimed. “Then protect her anyway.”

“We are. Her father is distraught, but she’s not… doing so well. She’s not listening to anyone. It’s like she’s a million miles away.”

Hermione relaxed her fist and forced her jaw to stop clenching. Her poor parents would tear their hair out if they saw the condition her molars were in after months of grinding her teeth.

Or would have, if they could ever remember her again. The memory charm she had cast on Mum and Dad was so extensive and violating that it was a permanent butchery - had made her obliviation of Dolohov seem practically incidental. 

_Now look who’s having their memory butchered._

She slid her hands across her face and into her hair. “Why,” her voice trembled, “why aren’t memory charms unforgivables?”

A hand grasped her shoulder tight. They sat that way for a few moments, and Harry squeezed her a few times when her breathing hitched. 

“Hey,” he said, after a minute had passed. “Hermione. An owl arrived at the ministry from Durmstrang’s librarian. It’s all the information on their dorm room wards, if you want to dig through it. It’s not much but it’s still something, if you want to take a look.” 

She looked up. This was tangible action. Something she could control, extract an advantage from, help protect herself maybe. 

_Wards against boggarts. Wards against erotic incest dreams._ (Harry cringed at that one: “I just- I’m glad we only had Fred and George to deal with, you know?”) _Wards against vampire visits._

_Aha!_

_Wards against dream invasion. Wards to interrupt dream invasion._

“Thank you Harry,” Hermione said breathlessly, and she hugged him tightly. The ward was old magic, blood runes by its description. And totally within her ability, even though she never got her NEWTs. The runes jogged her memory of runes carved into trees and boulders, so she looked up from the letter back to Harry. “I’ve been meaning to tell you. In the dreams that we share, he keeps taking me to a particular forest.”

“Could you describe it for me, please?”

Hermione blinked. He was sounding more and more like an Auror every day. Once she started to relay her memory, he wrote the details down in a notebook, and his piercing green gaze was unwavering. He really was going to be a good Auror. “These details help, Hermione. Every little detail can help.”

“Constant vigilance, huh.”

They both snorted.

Hermione put the letter into her desk. “Would you mind coming to the doctors with me again today?”

“Er- yeah.” Suddenly, Harry the Auror melted away and Harry the teenager pulled his hand through his hair. 

Hermione felt a wave of gratitude. The tray of pills below her bed was working just fine, but she thought that something more long-term would be better if-

_If this nightmare drags out._

—————

The contraceptive injection, her GP informed her, would cover her for twelve weeks. Already, the pill had suppressed her period, settling a shameful anxiety. The prospect of Antonin Dolohov finding her while she was aching and bleeding felt like a perverse worry, but the very idea of it humiliated her. 

She couldn’t bring herself to talk with her healer about that aspect of her fears. It seemed so _vain_ compared to everything else - compared to the dead Auror that had acted as translator. As she floo’d to Saint Mungo’s for her daily appointment later that afternoon, she reflected that she hadn’t even told her healer she was on muggle contraception, let alone how she was processing things emotionally. Maybe she should pursue a muggle psychologist after all. 

Hermione’s peach nails still gleamed in the light as she drummed them on the St Mungo’s reception desk. Fleur must have charmed them not to chip, because they still looked impeccable except for a tiny, thin line of new nail growth that remained bare at the cuticle. Had it already been a few days?

“Granger,” Hermione supplied to the receptionist.

“Oh.” The receptionist flicked through a stack of parchment. “You’ll have a reliever today.”

Hermione’s intuition twisted her belly. “Why?”

“She’s not available today.”

Hermione stared. “ _Why_ isn’t she available?”

“She- uh.” The receptionist looked at the closed office door and back at Hermione, seeming to deliberate. “She didn’t come in this morning.”

The world ground to a stuttering halt in Hermione’s mind.

The _healer_. 

Her bones turned to lead with dread. 

——-

Hermione had been made into a toy - a wind-up toy that had no choice, had been wound up and released into motion. She turned on her heels and left Saint Mungo’s to take the floo straight home. Shock strangled her as she stood motionless in front of the cottage fireplace. 

There must be a leak in the Aurors. Maybe even the ministry, or Saint Mungo’s. How else could he know who her healer was?

_First the Auror. Now her healer._

_How long until Luna and Xenophilius Lovegood are caught?_

She shut Crooks out of her room and sat at her with her foot bouncing furiously on the floor. Antonin Dolohov had all the time and leisure in the world to slowly pick off people even loosely connected to her as it suited him, while the Aurors rummaged around trying to grasp at straws. 

She had to intervene. 

Harry would stop her, she knew that.

If there was a ministry leak, she couldn’t even coordinate a trap with the Aurors to try ensnare him. She would just incite someone else’s murder by even trying. 

She looked down at the notes on her desk and scoffed at herself softly. All her research led to this point, even if she couldn’t admit it to herself at the time. None of it helped the Aurors determine where he was or how he could be stopped. It had all been on pureblood birthing practices, bedroom wards, nightmare spells, virgin blood bindings and Russian fertility spells. On what she might face with Dolohov. 

She firecalled Harry and told him about the healer. His silence for the next few hours elevated her suspicions until a stag patronus found her in her room.

“They have a team out looking for her now,” it said with Harry’s voice. “Just stay tight, Hermione.”

Her afternoon then became a fugue of cleaning, sorting, and pacing. She repaired her shoes. She wrote herself a letter and left it under the pillow to explain the events of the day, in case her whole day was obliviated. Then she pulled out books on runes and blood magic, glaring through them. Tracking spells. Binding spells. Invisible tracing hexes. Wandless ward jinxes. Anything that would make this exercise less than acquiescence, that would make it _count_.

She changed her underwear and her face felt hot in shame. The exercise felt unclean, to contemplate how Dolohov would be handling her body. She thought she’d become used to the hideous scar across her chest, but as she saw it in the mirror while getting changed, it mocked her.

“Are you alright, Hermione?” Fleur peered at her over dinner that evening. “Because you are being quiet today.”

“I just wanted to say thank you, to both of you,” Hermione said quietly. “I’m incredibly grateful that you’ve kept me here.”

“It’s nothing,” Fleur smirked. “If you are here when the baby arrives, we will be glad for the help.” She absent-mindedly drummed her fingers on her belly and she shared a smile with Bill.

Hermione’s fingers clutched at her own belly beneath the dinner table.

Four hours later, Bill’s snoring had evened out and the house was pitch black. Hermione had tied her shoes, left the letter under her pillow, put on her warmest jacket for the winter night, and stepped out into the night chill. 

“ _Lumos_ ,” she whispered, and her wand lit up like a glaring beacon.

The moon was out. Sand was picked up by the wind and whipped into her legs, but the sting of it on her ankles gave her a distraction from the foreboding dread. She had felt so restless, so trapped, for so _long_ \- and looking across the long open beach she could _finally_ -

She walked. She walked and walked, for minutes that stretched into an hour, wand tight in her hand in terror, and kept walking still, past empty dune after empty dune, never turning to look back. The occasional looming tree cut into the sky, black and tall, marking the long minutes of walking as they scrolled past her. The next time she would be sitting in a healer’s office, she’d be under the glowing, golden threads that would show she’d been obliviated once more. Even with her letter to herself, it would be humiliating. The healer would know. 

_Will you fake surprise?_

_Because they’ll stop you otherwise if you need to do this again._

She kicked some sand and the wind dissolved it along the beach line. Her _Lumos_ cut lines of shadows across the dunes that all seemed to point to her like a glowing sign. She walked on and the moon kept its lazy arc across the sky. 

It was as a stray wave swept past her shoes ( _good grief, wet shoes_ ) that she heard footsteps splashing through the water behind her. 

She froze on the spot. Her wand trembled and the shadows from her _Lumos_ danced. 

The steps continued slowly towards her. 

When she moved her wand arm, her wand flew out of her hand and into a dune, and she only had moonlight to see. She kept her glare staring forward. Muffled footsteps in the sand slowly grew louder and closer until they stopped and she felt the sand beneath her shift from his sheer size. 

_I'm going to hunt you,_ Hermione thought. _And you won't even know it._

A gentle touch curled around her waist. Then it was a heavy arm, snaking up and hooking across her chest in a crushing embrace. Her ears were ringing in sheer terror and she tasted metal in her mouth. 

“Shall we, little witch?” 

The apparition winded her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for following this fic and for all the encouragement. This chapter took a while because of current events in the world. <3
> 
> Thanks too to the quiet readers, I see you. 
> 
> We're back to regular updates! See you next sunday!


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> if reproductive violence is uncomfortable or upsetting for you, it might be best for you to skip this one. it's kind of the theme for this fic but this chapter is particularly egregious

The first sign that everything had gone  _ catastrophically _ wrong was her hands. 

She was just at the beach a second ago, wanting to vomit or scream with Dolohov’s arm clamped around her waist, and now-

Now a cold stone floor bit into her hip where she was lying, but it was her hands that caught her stare.

They were wobbling with the mechanical tremor of the cruciatus curse after-affects. Her fingers were filthy and chapped, and the nails-

_ Fuck. _

The peach colour of Fleur’s polish had grown out by an  _ enormous amount.  _ Instead of the thin strip of new nail growth at the base, almost half her nail-bed had grown out bare. There was  _ no way _ that she had arrived here from the beach today, or yesterday - or even this month.

She couldn’t stifle a horrified whimper. 

Her hands shot down across her body, and found her belly flat and her bones jutting. Her muggle jeans and clothes were gone. All that covered her instead was a plain blue dress that, when she wobbled to her feet, hung to her calves. 

And it was  _ sodden _ with blood. 

A monstrous headache thumped in her head, making her squint up at the only source of light far above, a skylight window set in the stone ceiling. Her trembling fingers checked the back of her head for an injury - for anything that could justify the sheer amount of blood - but couldn’t find anything. 

Nothing burned _ down there _ either. 

She felt like she’d walked into the final minutes of a class, or had open a book to its final pages. With no idea of how she got to this point, she stood inside a prison - luxuriant, but a prison nonetheless. Thick rug carpets covered the stone floors. Ornate shackle hooks studded into stone walls. Smooth stone walls swooped around, leaving no corners, and dark antique furniture littered the edges of the room.

Nowhere to hide. 

In the middle of the chamber was a sole bed, with a full canopy as a mockery of coziness. The twisted sheets were sprayed with blood. 

_ Crack! _

Hermione darted backwards into the stone wall.

Dolohov apparated to the other side of the bed, black linen and hunting leather beneath outer robes. He gazed impassively at her - even thoughtfully. A pink scar that Hermione didn’t remember slashed across his face, from his ear to his chin. He stepped forward and folded his arms, and his robes pulled across the floor, leaving a stripe of blood. 

She thought of the healer and swallowed. 

“Who’s blood-“ Hermione started, and her voice cracked in its hoarseness. Of course. Screaming from the cruciatus curse made the vocal cords raw. “Who’s blood is on the bed?”

_ You had better have left the Lovegoods alone, you vile monster. _

He tilted his head. “Do you like the way it looks?”

She looked closer at him and saw that the pinkness of his scar was knitting together, minuscule ropes of flesh creeping across and pulling it closed. The gash was deep. If it had landed even a few centimetres down, it would have slashed his throat open. 

It was  _ his _ blood on the bed, and whatever had been done to him - he’d survived, but only narrowly. 

“It will be your birthing bed for me,” he said.

_ Like hell.  _

She had been a witless  _ idiot _ for thinking she could appease him and walk back to the cottage. For thinking that the worst that could happen was obliviation. 

“How long have I been here?” She croaked. Her throat was parched, and her fingers were throbbing with bruises and cuts. Had she tried scrambling up the walls? Surely not. 

“Long enough to showcase your cunning and belligerence.” He drew his wand, and with a few flicks the bloodied bedding was banished. “It is not good to use the cruciatus curse on a women who may be carrying. It causes children to fall away from the womb. But for now, I find myself curious and uninhibited.”

With a flick of his wand, she collapsed on the floor in a paralytic tangle of splayed limbs - like a marionette with the strings cut. The dress was long enough to keep her decent while she huffed against the floor.

_ Where am I? What’s been done to me? How long have I been here?  _

Questions spun in her mind.

_ Don’t be selfish.  _

“Where is the healer?” Hermione croaked. “What did you do to her?”

“You do not bleed as a witch should.” He said softly, ignoring her. Hermione wondered if the statement was some miserable assertion about her status as a muggle-born witch. “You are young, yes - but not so young that you should not bleed. Why might that be?”

_ Oh my god. _

Hermione felt her face go hot with a mortified flush, and she scrunched her eyes shut. Antonin Dolohov was asking about her monthly cycle like she was a crup in heat. 

“I am  _ not _ a breeding mare.”

He couldn’t be a legilimens, as Professor Snape or You-Know-Who had been, or else he wouldn’t be asking. But she had no idea how long she’d been held by Dolohov, and the muggle contraceptive injection she’d been given would only work for twelve weeks.

She was on borrowed time. 

“If you shall not answer me as a witch, I will enjoy finding the answers from you as a woman.” He stood over her and seemed to deliberate. “You came to me too young to know the full depravities that can be done for pleasure. But I have enjoyed very much discovering the things that make you weep. Would you like to rediscover them together?”

She ground her teeth. She must not have told him about the muggle contraceptive while being tortured earlier, or he wouldn’t be asking again. So she could try to continue keeping the secret. 

But on the other hand, an ex-death eater wouldn’t hesitate to send her to the Janice Thickey ward for the permanently insane, pregnant and witless for the rest of her life. 

She shuddered. 

“It’s stress.” Hermione lied, face still pressed into the bare floor. Her arm was going numb pinned beneath her weight. “It doesn’t... behave  _ normally  _ when I’m stressed.” 

“Hmm.” He sounded idle and unconvinced. “ _ Crucio _ .”

She screamed. It hurt. It  _ hurt _ . Shooting hot, needling pain flashed out across her skin and set her nerves alight. Time disappeared, and she lost herself in acrid, burning pain that hammered her in agony. Her ears rang and her body quivered, until she was sucking down air in heaving breaths.

“You have told this lie before.” 

He was silent for another few moments, and she realised he was giving her time to revise her answer. 

“ _ Cruc-“ _

“I’m too thin.” She blurted out between gasps. “I’m… too thin. My mother… was the same.” Her mind scrambled to substantiate the lie as her voice rasped.“I’m… an only child. She couldn’t keep weight on.”

This seemed to stop him for a moment. He released the spell pinning her to the ground.

“Is that so. You will no longer deny food.”

She had denied food.

That scrap of information felt important. She had noticed that she was more thin, but had thought that she’d been starved - that this would force him to make sure she had food - not that she had been refusing food herself. 

The human body stopped ovulating if it was too light. Was that her plan before losing her memory?  It was possible. Make sure she was too underweight by the time her muggle contraceptive injection ran out, buying herself more time. 

But had she given away something she had closely guarded?

In the fallout of the cruciatus curse, and with her mind racing, she found herself levitated into a bathroom. 

“Undress,” he said, dropping her onto the floor. 

With two taps of his wand, steaming water swooped in to fill a claw-footed bathtub. She stood and glared at him - dressed in full dueling robes sodden with blood, waiting for her - then around the room. It was set out with a vanity table and other luxuries, as if she were a mistress.

She was missing something.

Something was desperately wrong. 

Why was she kept in such comfortable conditions? Why was she in such poor physical shape despite this fact? 

And where was his fury and anger? If she had gashed his face before being obliviated, he should be livid and vengeful. His cold patience made her skin crawl. She was missing crucial details and it ran her stomach cold.

_ Tick tock.  _

He made his way around the bathtub towards her in measured steps, like a dancer waiting for her to respond in kind. “You are so dirty. It is no condition for a witch to bear children.”

He had complete control. 

_ If he keeps control, he’s going to put a baby in you. _

Reactive panic gripped her. She snatched a candlestick from the vanity table and darted away, keeping the tub between them, but he was too quick. She struck out at him, but he seemed faintly amused as his heavy hands dragged her into the tub with a furious cry, and with another flick of his wand she was paralysed again as she half scrambled out of the tub, causing her to slump backwards.

She closed her eyes and focused on breathing. He stroked the tip of her braid between his fingers.

_ In.  _

_ Out.  _

“You are vindictive and conniving. It will do well in children.” 

Slowly, the braid in her hair was pulled apart, segment by segment, until her curls sprung out in his hands. 

“ _ Don’t- _ -" she snarled, "-don't  touch my hair.”

“Are you so attached to braiding it away?” The amusement in his voice made something inside her bubble in rage. He splayed her hair across her shoulders. “I had expected to settle a child in you and set you loose. But what you said is true. You are not a breeding mare.”

She flinched as water and soap snaked up through her hair, no doubt by his magic. A sinking feeling went through her.

“Hippogriffs cannot be simply mated. They must be broken in before they will carry, if they are owned by a master.” Fingers swirled a lather into her scalp, pulling the roots taut beneath his hands in painful twists. Her hair was filthy. She bit the inside of her cheek to distract herself. “They are never obedient, but their acquiescence is enough. They must be well fed and well kept. Mated often. It is a laborious exercise.”

The candle-stick leapt back up into its rightful place. His wandless magic was effortless.

“It is clear now that you require far closer attention.”.

She stared incredulously at the candlestick. It was as if he didn’t care about her violence. 

No - he actively took  _ pleasure _ in her resistance. 

He was treating her like an animal to be trained into helpless acceptance. A non-reactive master patiently crushing spirit with a firm hand. 

She felt panic rising up in her throat as he pulled water through her hair to rinse, and a scrubbing spell scoured across her body. Another tap of his wand banished the water. She felt like a crup being groomed and it was humiliating. When he picked her up and walked them to the bed in the centre of the chamber, the window soared over her vision and she couldn’t even writhe in protest.

“It is gratuitous to spend myself inside you if you will not carry. And the cruciatus curse today will not help my children take root.” He pushed his lips to her ear. “But you do inspire base pleasures.”

Conjured bindings pinned her wrists to the headboard and pressed her knees flat. “Still so small and girlish,” he hummed, and he splayed his hand across her belly. “But your hips will flatten perfectly.”

She bit back an urge to gasp when his hand slipped carefully down to her sex.

With clinical precision, his finger pressed circles into the apex of her folds. Hermione couldn’t suppress the warm twitching through her core. 

“You will not sabotage what your body is ready for.”

Two fingers pumped inside, curling gently past her hymen and pressing up into her, forcing coils of pleasure to tremble in her belly, twisting tighter and tighter, until his pace became firm and insistent. She tried desperately to drift away from her body and focus on her situation. 

It was critical to determine what he was hiding, what had happened, and how long she had been there. 

Was Fleur still safe? Was she even still pregnant, or did she and Bill have a new child in her old room?

Would the Ministry still even be looking for her?

But the sensations of his fingers dragged back her attention when she felt a burning flush of pleasure bloom across her face and her chest. With a miserable cry, she felt a flood of pleasure ripple up inside her and she tumbled into an orgasm through tears.

It was the worst part of his violations. It always had been. 

“Your body is twitching and pulling,” he said, staring at her with cold, watchful eyes as he pressed his fingers up into her pelvis, riding out the twitches of her climax. “Do you feel it wanting to quicken?”

A sob escaped from her lips.

“Such a curious thing to weep over.” He pulled his hand back gently and traced a line across the scar trailing along her chest, then held her shoulder. “This is a simple process. You need only yield. It is natural.”

“Burn in fiendfyre,” Hermione whispered, and thick tears wobbled the black canopy in her vision. She needed a wand. She needed  _ his _ wand. And she needed a plan.

A hot prodding pressed against her slick sex. He considered her for a moment, looming over her beneath the drapes of the black canopy above, and she saw that the scar on his face had closed tight shut. It’s new white hue gleamed across his face.

Nothing was new. The nightmares were repeating in reality. 

“Watch, witch.” He looked down on her with hooded eyes. “We may be making your firstborn.”

He rolled deeply. 

——————-

Over the next few days, he set the routine. 

He visited to feed her, clean her, and rape her. 

In that order.

That first night she spent staring at the skylight in pitch darkness as the stars scrolled past, mind galloping and scrambling to find purchase at the clues around her. She’d inherited a situation of chess that was already half played, with wins, losses and strategy that she only saw the result of, blind to how they arrived at that juncture. 

That scar across his face was a reminder of her near victory. She had almost won, with no idea how, but her resentment was transforming into burning motivation. She needed to  _ know _ him to kill him, and she needed to excavate from her situation how exactly she almost did it last time. 

He seemed titillated by her resistance and remained pathologically in control. As if he harboured a moral superiority in breaking her down. 

It was clear that she had refused to eat, wash or engage with him before the obliviation, and that he hadn’t minded. But something had changed. When he arrived the following morning he had to transfigure a new chair to watch her. He seemed to be establishing a new pattern with a sense of leisurely curiosity.

“You may resist,” he stated. “The imperius curse can be a pleasure to cast.”

She resisted anyway. 

He visited both morning and evening. Forced her under the imperius curse. Made her eat the food that appeared on the table, then wash herself in the tub under his gaze. 

He lifted the imperius curse when he pressed her down into the bed. His eyes grew black with desire when she kicked and thrashed and scratched him. It was the same as the nightmares, in that he had a sense of violent efficiency, but now she had the acute feeling there was something being held back in him, like a howling wind rattling at a door, and the slippery sensations felt more hideous between her legs than they had in any nightmare. 

After knitting her together down  _ there _ afterwards, he would bind her wrists to the bed in magical ropes while he examined her quarters, then he would apparate away. 

The tub was always empty when the bindings faded. Her thighs would grow cold and slippery, then tacky as time went on, with her blood and his semen down her legs. 

It was vile. 

But she kept busy.

When he wasn’t present, she looked furiously for signs of her previous occupation. On the underside of the antique table he brought food to, she found tiny tallies, little half-moon crescents from nails. 

Eighty four of them. 

If they were from her - and that was no guarantee, she admitted to herself darkly - she had mere weeks before becoming fertile again. She would have been there for a month and a half. The nail from her forefinger slipped perfectly into one of the tallies, and she leapt away, pacing the room in agitation. 

It was a ticking clock counting down on her. 

Her mind couldn’t stop thinking about her healer and the Lovegoods. Dolohov ignored all questions about them, and she knew that any answer from him couldn’t be trusted. 

She found herself staring at the rugs and wondering if Luna or her healer had been killed in this prison.

She felt a hum in her scar across her chest, too - almost like a prickling that hostile wards could do, like the ones in Gringotts. If this was a family estate, she considered that the magic from Dolohov in her scar might interact somehow with the wards. She told herself to test that when her strength returned.

She was so exhausted from being tortured, she found herself promising to investigate things later and resting on the bed or in the empty tub. She didn’t want to be caught investigating her prison too closely, and she heard several cracks of apparition outside through the day. 

He wasn’t far. 

The only thing she forced herself to do, even though it wore out her arms, was yank her hair into a braid. The idea of his hands through her loose hair was rage inducing, and her instincts made her feel safer with a braid down her back. 

When she heard roaring winds and looked up, she saw naked, black branches drift across the window. 

It was the forest from her nightmares she told Harry about. 

She bit her lip. How many forests could suit her descriptions? She stared at the window to the sky and clenched her fists. 

The clouds rolled past, indifferent.

—————-

Two days slipped by, and her strength was starting to creep back. 

Hermione had felt sadness and waves of regret. Anger, too, had made her jaw ache from grinding her teeth in the night. The stone prison - was it a converted, old castle tower? - loomed up in silence and she couldn't even hear birdsong.

But on the morning of her third (remembered) day of imprisonment, after Dolohov had apparated away, she felt vindictive. That’s how she found herself on the bed with her blue dress pulled up around her hips, breathing slowly with her hands on her sex. 

Dolohov had always paid particular attention to making her bleed. He would pull his hands across the blood on her thighs when he pumped into her, and gaze at it with an intensity that made her skin crawl.

It would be the last time she would feel that pain.

With two fingers uncomfortably slipped inside of herself, she pulled down and to the side until a splitting, sharp pain shot through her, forcing a gasp and a nervous recoil. 

_ “Have I torn you a second time-?” _

_ “-you come apart so well-” _

Hermione flinched her fingers away. She clenched her thighs shut, and picked at the end of her braid, ignoring the faint smell of blood that seemed to be her constant companion. 

That evening, Hermione kicked her legs furiously and growled through gritted teeth as Dolohov pinned her to the bed. When she felt her linen shift being rucked up around her waist, she stared at the skylight and imagined smashing every pane in so that the glass would rain down.

_ Wait _ , she thought.  _ Glass shards- _

Her knees were forced apart and the bruising weight of his knees on her inner thighs made her stifle a gasp. His hands reached down between her legs to spread her folds apart, and she didn’t need to look at him to feel his gaze on the throbbing pain already between her legs. 

Her nostrils flared in anger and a sense of contempt rose up through her. She expected rage from him - the cruciatus curse, strangulation,  _ something  _ \- but the silence buried a sense of nervousness in her.

“How predictable.” 

_ Predictable? _

_ Have I done this before? _

He murmured a spell in a low voice, and a prickling sensation spread across her opening until the aching of her split hymen dissolved away as it knitted together. A finger traced over it, and Hermione wriggled in a furious attempt to strike out. 

“Get your  _ disgusting _ hands away—!” 

“ _ That,” _ he emphasised, “is mine. You shall not touch what is not yours.”

Hermione gave him a furious glower before she could help it, but he had no reaction to her derision. Instead, he looked thoughtful for a moment. 

“Let me teach you something about yourself.” 

With a gesture of his wand, she was paralysed again. 

He rose up to stand and undress - to actually undress - and it was like seeing him for the first time again. First, the robes came off, then the shirt and trousers, until he stood at the bed like a naked beast. Black hair. White scars that roped across his body. Broad hands that folded his clothes. And the erection she refused to look at.

As he climbed over her and settled between her legs, his shoulders blotted out the light above. He pressed his warm body down against hers, burying his face into her neck, and the sheer size of him against her jutting bones was suffocating. 

“Hermione,” he breathed

Her gut twisted. No. No, no,  _ no.  _

He hummed into the crook of her neck for a moment. “Children can be made in violence or in passion.” She began to pant as she felt a kiss against her throat. 

_ Block him out. Ignore him- _

“You are uncommon to have such terror for my affections rather than my violence.” He bit her clavicle and his fingers traced the lines of her ribs, drifting down and down. His accented voice sounded tender, and it was far worse than his patient, careful clipped tones. “Imagine my surprise. Imagine my delight.”

He pressed his hot length along the seam of her slit and rolled his hips against her. She felt muscles ripple against her belly. 

“Do you wonder about your ancestors?” He whispered below the dip of her ear. As though he were a lover. “How the women were taken by men? How they gave children so generously in return?” 

He slid the head of his cock up and down her sex and gazed at her with intensity, and she squeezed her eyes shut.

“It is rumoured that Grindelwald was born of an unwilling mother, and the Dark Lord of an unwilling father. Such beautiful sacrifices, to make the magic run hot.”

He thrust into her up to the hilt and pressed hard against her cervix. She cried out in agony. 

“I know. I know.” He stroked her clit between languid, slow thrusts that skewered her, and she couldn’t help herself. It burned and it hurt as it always did, but the familiarity and intimacy of his behaviour made her feel complicit. She had walked out of the safety of shell cottage to him. Out to this. And now he was getting her off around himself. 

She sobbed in earnest, and felt a soft kiss against a tear on her cheek.

“A witch’s anguish... is a wizards pleasure... and a child’s strength.” He was panting, murmuring softly into her ear, and - she realised - losing control. His clinical precision fell away and left greedy hunger in its wake. He was breathless and tense, rather than calculated, and his fingers twitched. 

She could use this. Whether it was the intimacy or her distress, something was making him lose his awareness.

“I will make a mother of you yet.”

Could she goad him? She hiccuped a sob and forced herself to swallowed. “Don’t—“ she said, barely a whisper. “Please don’t—“

He slipped into Russian. His hands no longer simply pressed her apart; they hooked around her paralysed body and held her greedily while he pressed into her. His murmurs into her skin were said like prayers and his eyes slid almost out of focus. His splayed fingers slipped down to the nape of her back and crushed her into him.

He was enraptured.

Her skin crawled in total revulsion. 

But this was a tool, a glimmer of strategy. She took it quietly and locked it away in the back of her mind, and wondered - while Dolohov stroked long thrusts into the painful burning between her legs - what her healer’s name was.

He pressed his forehead to hers when he came inside with heaving twitches.

She opened her eyes to see him with eyes closed.

The scar looked back at her. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you're all doing well 💖 Thanks for reading, it's been really nice to develop this with you guys following along. 
> 
> We're in the final stretch. :)


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hermione Granger comes out of the gate with a vengeance.
> 
> Warning that this chapter has a graphic depiction of blood.

Hermione stood, stricken, over her bloodied sheets. 

Her monthly cycle had started again. 

Under the morning light pouring through the skylight, she grit her teeth and ripped off the bedding - basically a glorified altar of rape at this point - before realising there was nowhere to put it. 

She patted her hand onto the back of her dress and felt a wet patch. She’d bled through her clothes. Shame bubbled below the surface of her chest. She whirled on her feet and paced in a circuit around the room, gliding alongside the wall in anxious, furious anticipation with the linen fisted in one arm.

_Three weeks._

After three weeks of repetitive, mind-numbing, violating days scrolling past her, she had nothing to show for it except for the occasional ache deep in her belly (that she was certain was her cervix) and some goddamned bloody sheets. Dolohov would be pleased, and it would be revolting.

“Fuck,” she growled, throwing the linen across the chamber.

She rolled her fingertips across the nude nailpolish that had mostly grown out. Three weeks of _nothing_. She even had seized the candlestick holder from the bathroom and thrown it at the skylight glass only for it to bounce away at a ward that summoned an amused Dolohov. 

“You’ve tried that before,” he’d said, and then he forced her down on the bed early that evening.

She stared a burning hole at the bloodied linen. Fleur would be heavily pregnant by now, she thought to herself. Looking forward to becoming a mother, Bill watching over her. The spare room at the cottage was probably being transformed into a nursery. 

Hermione’s eyes prickled with the threat of tears and she clamped her arms around her mid region.

She didn’t want to be a mother, not at _all_ . She missed her _own_ mother. Wandering around Australia, most likely, without knowing a whit that she’d carried and birthed and loved Hermione, and made her feel special even when she was having non-magical summers away from everyone else that she knew. Her dad making scrambled eggs on toast Saturday mornings and waking her up with stupid puns at her bedroom door with a cup of tea.

Hermione huffed and crackled a knuckle in her fist. 

Dolohov making her a mother - being the father to her children - made her absolutely sick. It couldn’t happen. Which was why she’d gone over her room in forensic detail.

Apart from the tallies that ticked her days away underneath the antique furniture desk, there was nothing. No loose stones. No sign that she’d done anything except refuse food, get assaulted, refuse to bathe, and put a good scar on his face.

Until Dolohov decided that forcing her to eat and bathe everyday was going to change the fact that she wasn’t falling pregnant. Pureblood bigot. He hadn’t even a faint clue that she was on hormonal contraceptive, but that time was apparently up now.

The crimson on the sheets mocked her. Her chin dimpled as she stifled a wobbling lower lip. Storming over to the sheets, she snatched them up and looked around the room. Under the bed. It was the only place for them. 

She stalked up to the edge of the bed with furious, burning intention. It didn’t matter a single bit to actually hide that she was bleeding - he was going to see it because he saw that part of her twice every day. If he wanted to violate her that way, he could come to terms with the fact that she did, in fact, bleed. 

But the sheets were offensive - a terrible reminder - and Hermione was offended enough by his despicable routine of trying to force her pregnant. As if she was a - what did he say? A hippogriff? 

No. 

The sheets had to go.

“Right.” She glowered at the edge of the bed on her knees. The gap under the side of the bed was too narrow for her to stuff the sheets through. She lifted the edge, _heaved_ it up, and kicked the sheets under the bed, then flopped down on the mattress, gritting her teeth.

The sun was starting to stream in. He’d be here within the hour.

She’d given up crying about two weeks ago when she realised that it got him off, and if she could make the exercise more mechanical and less exciting for him, she absolutely would. So she’d simply stared at the ceiling and stayed silent, ignoring him while he took her. 

At first it was hard. 

She couldn’t ever ignore that initial splitting pain when he tore her. Some days it was worse; he’d mount her and drag his cock down on an upstroke, so the pain would radiate lower, and her thighs would jerk hard against his hips. He chuckled the first time he did it, when it got a reaction, so now it’s what happened if she didn’t go to the bed without asking once he arrived.

He was training her.

But if she didn’t comply, he made things worse. She was allowed to afford herself small comforts now.

Other days, if he masturbated her first he’d press himself in and the pain was just a pinch. That was still the worst; it took two weeks for her to stop crying. The last time snapped any emotional impact out of it, though.

“For a family, my witch,” he had murmured, curling his fingers into her. “Your magic’s most fundamental desire, to meld itself to a man and bury a child in you. It is a deep urge. Let it be.”

She stared at the black, bare branches waving over the skylight up above. “You’re going to die in here,” she replied. She had no idea where it had come from.

He smirked and rolled his fingers up into her pelvis. Her thighs quivered and wet smacking met her ears before she climaxed, and the tears crawled down her cheeks when she arched back and bit down on a panting gasp, but then-

Then, he’d been ruthless, rolling his fingers across her again and again through the orgasm, and he kept going, while he lined himself up against her.

“Show me, then, witch.” 

But he didn’t let up, pressing across her clit in firm, slick circles while he snapped himself in to the hilt.

“Stop-!” Hermione gasped, and he kept massaging, looking down at her with his grey stare. “Stop-!”

“Mercy?” He breathed when he bottomed out inside her. “A mother would kill the father of her children and beg for mercy?”

He didn’t stop, and the jolts of pleasure became sore, like electric shocks, ruined of any pleasure. Hermione thrashed her head away from him and bit hard into the inside of her cheek, then something inside her steeled. He wasn’t a father - wasn’t like her Dad, wasn’t like Bill was going to be a dad, not like Arthur Weasley. Her Mum and Fleur and every other mother she knew would bludgeon this man to death for doing this to any daughter of theirs. The massaging across her clit made her thighs shudder, but she scrunched her face and meditated on his death. 

He was merely human - blood, and flesh-

_And scars._

-yes, and scars, including the one she gave him.

She’d decided if she never masturbated again in her life it would be too soon. When he finally spent himself with a moan and left after inspecting the prison, she meditated on the scar across his face, and on the image of the poor Saint Mungo’s healer that was probably long dead. His death became a mantra. 

He was a dead man violating her, and it meant nothing when he reached down to touch her. It was only a matter of getting him to die now.

So she waited, and planned and thought. 

Only now, she had her period, and that changed things. She stared into the sky, and it was so bright it burned. The blood on her thighs was something she was used to, but it felt different without his- 

Without his _contribution_.

Lying on her bed, waiting for him to come, she yanked her hair back into a tight braid and huffed. Something at the back of her mind pulled at her thoughts, though. Like a shadow. As if she-

_-under the bed-_

remembered something, like when her nightmares came back to her in her London flat. It was hard to distinguish reality from flickers of paranoia sometimes. The memory of Crookshanks in the laundry came back into her mind, and her eyes pricked a moment at the thought. Would he get along with Fleur’s new baby? She hoped they’d give him to Harry or the Weasleys to look after if he got horrible with their baby.

She banished the thought again. In its place was a desperate whisper to look under the-

_Crack!_

Hermione leaped up onto her feet, clutching her fists at her side. Dolohov stared long at her, then paced slowly around, eyes drifting down to the back of her ridiculous blue linen dress. She knew there was blood.

“Are you ashamed?” She heard a new tone in his voice - not even amusement, but something else she couldn’t place. He kept pacing around her until he stood in front of her again. “You are healthy. It should be a woman’s pride.”

Hermione’s stomach knotted in dread. He didn’t step closer, merely tapped a finger to his lip in a thoughtful gesture. 

“Does it pain you?”

Hermione scoffed, and he frowned. 

“You pain me _every day_ ,” she spat.

“And yet.” His eyes drifted up and down over her body. “Take off your garment.”

He would do something vicious and cast _imperio_ on her anyway if she resisted, so she took off the dress. It looked like what muggle women in cults wore. She hoped he burned it. 

“You are a vision.” He said simply. She clamped her arms around herself and glared. His eyes were again on her thighs, covered in blood. She needed to bathe, but she refused to feel shame standing there this way. If it was another exercise of humiliation that he was going through, a reaction would be the worst thing to give him.

“Every important day of your life, you will be bloodied in this way-”

“You are genuinely unhinged,” she retorted.

“-and you mustn't pain yourself needlessly. You will take primrose while you recover.” His eyes were piercing. She refused to answer him, and he disapparated with a crack.

She stood, naked, craving the shower at her London flat, or even a swim at Shell cottage. Anything but the clawfoot bath again. 

He was away for at least an hour, but she didn’t care. The bleeding was a new development, but the eternal waiting in the silent circular prison was now routine. Occasionally it would be punctuated by the crack of apparition outside , or the black, creepy trees waving up overhead. But she was beginning to get used to meditating, pacing, and occasionally trying to exercise in the tiny space she had. 

When he returned, he placed four items at the end of the bed. A potion, a new linen dress, a bundle of underwear that looked charmed to be self-cleaning, and a new bundle of bedding. 

He made her dress after a bath (a _bath_ \- her skin crawled, she needed a _shower_ ) and made her drink the potion. 

“What else was in that,” she asked after gulping it down. It didn’t have the same taste as her normal primrose potion - in addition to the fatty oiliness, it had a curt, almost sour taste to it.

“Something that helps a witch quicken. And to make it easier for boys to settle in you.” He looked down at her in a calculating gaze. “It is best for a family if the eldest-born is a boy. It is a burden best borne by wizards.”

Of course he would do this, Hermione thought with numbness. She’d expected worse, if she was honest.

_Crack._

The sound of an apparition crack in the distance was barely perceptable, but Dolohov showed no notice. Hermione was totally still, holding the empty potion vial. It wasn’t Dolohov apparating outside. Her throat trembled briefly. It _wasn’t Dolohov outside_ . It could be _Harry_. 

_Every detail counts, Hermione_ , Harry had said, sounding every bit the auror, gazing at her with burning concern. He wouldn’t give up on her, even if the Ministry did. Her mind was racing ahead. If she knew when he was here, and she figured out how to get Dolohov’s wand-

“I will call on you in the evenings.” Dolohov stated. With a sweep of his wand, the bed was re-made. She remained still for a moment, trying her disguise the trepidation of hope shooting through her. “Rest now, and remain in bed.”

She scoffed under her breath. “I’ve slept long enough. You can’t make me lie down for days.”

“There are other places I can bury myself inside you, witch,” he said without missing a beat, “and you will not enjoy it. So you will rest in bed until I call on you.” 

Dread shot through Hermione and she swallowed, looking down at the bed. He’d brought a new blanket, with stitched hippogriffs that lined the edges, and it looked like something her mother would make. As she slid down into the sheets, the thought that he had actually had a mother made her recoil. 

“Your mother-,” Hermione started, before cutting herself off.

He tilted his head for a moment. She looked up at him from the pillow. The wind pulled the branches over the skylight again for a moment, and a lone bird flew over during the empty silence. “Yes?”

She changed her mind; had no interest in whatever wretched woman had a hand in making the blanket over her. 

“She would be disgusted by this.”

“I expect so. She was much like you.” He reached forward and stroked the tip of her braid, and she yanked her head away. 

“Did she kill your father, then?”

He looked almost fondly down at her and the corner of his mouth twitched. “She died where you lie now, birthing her third child.”

“So that’s how you came about, too? From a woman captured and raped and buried when she couldn’t do it anymore?”

“Buried?” He arched a brow. “She was fed to thestrals.”

The plain tone he said it offended her to the core, and rage flooded through her stomach and down to her guts. “I’m going to kill anything you put in me.”

“If it were that simple, this would all be futile.” He stalked around her prison, checking every piece of furniture, each fixture in the stone walls, like it was every other normal morning. “Everything I require of you is between your legs, of course, and I can obliviate away your wits. It would be a shame, however.” He checked the bathroom before wandering back out. “Your hate is truly lovely.” 

He strode to the bedside a final time and loomed over her with calm eyes. Still totally serene. “If you try to harm any child of mine, I will obliviate parts of you away. You will die in little pieces. Like this.”

He raised his wand, and she kicked back the blankets in a mad rush. 

“ _Obliviate_.”

Icy stillness waved over her and she collapsed back. Snippets of her life flashed like shimmering waves in front of her eyes, rolled over her and swooped back into the depths of her subconscious. Flashes of inconsequential moments were pulled forward - moments on the tip of her tongue that she couldn’t quite remember - but she thought she saw pictures on a wall, a bedroom, scrambled eggs and toast - before he snatched it up and it wisped it into nothing.

“What did you take?” She screeched. She kicked off the bedding and leaped up to her feet. “ _What did you take_?”

With a snap of his wand, she was shoved back into bed. “Don’t tempt me, witch.” His tone was simple and firm, like setting the boundaries of a child. “Stay in bed, or you will be tied down and taken like a wayward whore.”

He disapparated away with an obnoxious crack and she punched her fist down onto the mattress, sucking down hyperventilating gasps. He was going to die. She was going to figure out how she slashed his ugly, hateful face last time and he was going to _die_. The throbbing of her period ached up her belly, and she screamed into her pillow, and screamed some more, until she was hoarse.

\--------------------------------------

Staring at the skylight, she combed furiously through her thoughts. 

What did he take? 

It felt small, almost surgical, how he’d flitted through and snatched something out of the depths of her mind. She picked her braid apart and the curls bounced out, and she yanked it back into a tight braid again in an unflinching effort to get a sense of control. There was a faint whisper in the back of her mind that he took something she wanted - that she desperately needed. It was like-

_-under the bed-_

She sat up. Under the _bed_. She glanced around with a wariness, remembering his threat to make her stay in bed, and shuddered at the implications of what he’d do to her if she got up. Getting out of bed to spite him would yield her nothing but pain, and she was loathe to give him something new that he could enjoy. But something niggled at her about the bed.

She padded her feet down, carefully to see if there was a spell or charm that he had set up to alert him of her getting out of bed.

None so far. 

Heaving up the bed took enormous effort; it was antique, heavy and huge, but eventually she jammed a footrest under the corner and knelt down on the stone floor, looking underneath the bed. 

The bloodied linen stared back at her. 

She glowered at it. Useless. She snatched at the linen, and took one last glance. 

Dark brown blood stained the headboard at the base of the bed - runes. 

She _knew_ those runes. They were the _Durmstrang_ runes. The very ones Durmstrang resisted telling her about because she was muggleborn, so she had to get Harry to send an owl after them. The ones she fought so hard to find and research because the Ministry couldn’t keep Dolohov away no matter what, and she’d just been cooped up like a sitting chicken at Shell Cottage with Fleur, flitting out only to see the healer.

God. She missed Fleur. The healer’s funeral service was probably months ago now and she couldn’t even remember her name.

She stared at the runes. In such a weak form - using blood, and without enough magic from a wand - they would wear out in a matter of… hours, maybe a couple of days, if she really threw her magic behind it. No wonder she woke up exhausted when she had first been obliviated. She knew the signs of the cruciatus curse from Bellatrix Lestrange - the tremor in hands, the hoarse voice - but the headache was furious. She’d thought it was the obliviation, but now that she thought about it, it felt like a fundamental exhaustion at the end of a long day of magic and classes at Hogwarts.

But that runic ward in particular - it was a ward against dream invasion. Hermione bit her lip, reading the bloody runes on the headboard again. Each time Dolohov had violated her in her London flat, she’d had hallucinations of nightmares and an oppressive sense of paralysis. Dolohov violated herself in real life now, but the ward might still release her from any paralysis or bindings. 

She stuffed the linen back under the bed, pressing it against the runes to hide them, and heard a clink.

A fragment of glass glinted back at her, wedged up at the wooden lip of a ridge halfway up the headboard. Breathless, Hermione stretched out and picked it up.

 _You have tried this before_ , he’d said when she lobbed the candlestick up at the skylight. 

Yes, and she’d scavenged some glass.

She felt like she was holding something sacred.

She slotted it immediately back into place, scrambling out from under the bed and standing bolt upright. This required a plan, and proper execution. He obviously hadn’t found these last parts of the puzzle last time, and she’d kept them secret. She shuddered to think of the price she must have paid to keep these final pieces hidden. He must have thought it was a fluke, whatever had happened, rather than by careful design.

The final pieces of the puzzle were lined up in place. She merely needed a plan. The execution had to be perfect. 

But she was Hermione Granger. 

In her bones, she knew she had to at least _try_.

\-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Her period stopped after two days. 

Dolohov couldn't know that, though. Each time he came to check on her, she bundled herself up beneath the blanket, looking miserable and staring at the ceiling in a flat refusal to engage with him. The obliviation was fundamentally violating, but he relished in how much it had upset her, and seemed to enjoy the lingering effect of shock.

She kept on taking the evening primrose when he gave it to her, with the sourness of whatever fertility manipulation had been added in, but the respite from sexual assault was relieving. 

All she was able to do was lie in bed, only permitted to go to the bathroom when he visited in the morning and evening, and think incessantly about how to kill him. 

The apparition cracks in the distance outside still happened at least once a day.

Five days after her menstruation finished, it was time. 

She crawled under the bed and pulled out the glass. Rotating it in the light, it had already been sharpened to a tip. If she had to guess, it would have taken days of grinding away. She probably used the tiles in the bathroom to file it sharp.

She chose to draw blood from the bottom of her foot - If he saw anything out of the ordinary, if _anything_ tipped him off, she was resigned to a life of being raped and birthing Antonin Dolohov’s children. So she pulled the glass across the arch of her foot and swept up blood on her finger.

She pressed a line along the existing runes. The residual magic was faintly perceptible, and she squinted at it, honing her attention to its sharpest point.

 _Work_ , she told it, with scathing intention. _Work_.

\----------------------------------------------

She lobbed the candlestick at the skylight as _hard_ as she could. 

It bounced off a barrier ward and clattered back on the stone floor with a deafening clang. Hermione genuinely thought it was the loudest noise, bar her own screaming, that she’d heard since waking up in the prison. She looked around for a pensive moment, and deliberated. The first time she’d done this, it had taken him mere seconds to arrive. 

Silence stretched on, and on, and _on_.

She swallowed. 

She walked back over to the candlestick holder, grasping it with a shaky hold. This needed to _work_. This was not a good sign. 

She lobbed it again at the skylight.

Seconds later, there was a crack of apparation behind her, and Dolohov’s magic yanked her to the bed, face down. Magic lashings bound her wrists to the headboard and he pressed her legs apart from behind with a bruising grip.

_Wait. Face down?_

“Laying hands on a mudblood again,” she bit out into the pillow. 

“You are no mudblood.” His deep voice resounded above her, sounding almost patient. His controlled tone chilled her to the bone. She huffed into the pillow and a sense of nervousness bubbled, but she forced it down. 

He’d never pinned her face down before. Her heart thumped. She had no idea if he could see her wrists in the bindings. Behind her, she heard the clink of a belt. 

“I was born to muggle parents. What do you think that means?” She forced out, hearing a wobble in her voice. 

_Follow his attention. You can’t try the bindings with his eyes on you. Fuck._ Fuck.

“You have too much magic in yourself for that. You cannot truly believe it.” His weight shifted heavily on the bed, and he rucked up her dress past her waist, revealing her underwear. “At the very least, your so-called father could not have fathered you.” 

Wait.

Like several windows lining up over a long distance, a realisation crushed her.

“My father…” she started.

_I can’t remember Dad’s face._

The revelation was like a stone dropping in her stomach, and the world felt tethered by a thread around her. She whimpered and felt like throwing up onto the pillow. Her chest felt tight and she began to pant in fear. 

“Unkind, isn’t it.” His clipped, accented voice murmured into her ear. “To have parts of you obliviated away like sand in the wind. He was a mere muggle, witch. You won’t miss even his memory now.”

She felt so genuinely sick that her mouth felt wet and her panting began to pick up in earnest. She was shaking as Dolohov shifted around on the bed out of her field of vision, and she heard the sound of his robes dropping into a pool on the stone floor.

_I’m going to die here. I’m going to die on this bed pushing out his children and be fed to thestrals, and my parents won’t even remember me._

She swallowed the sick feeling and writhed in panic, but no matter how hard she sucked in air it felt like it was stuttering in her chest. Faintly, she heard the glass blade below her pillow scratch against the wood of the headboard. Totally out of reach. 

She felt the tip of his wand at the nape of her back, and she flinched away from it. A wave of magic breezed over her, writhed deep inside her like a cool chill, and squirmed low in her belly. She felt _emptied_.

_What?_

He lay his body down over her, and panic siezed her. He was naked, and his skin was hot. He was savouring this, truly taking his time. Only once earlier had he undressed completely in this prison. This was _special_ to him. 

“There are many ways to take a witch. Some ways more improper than others, but all with their own pleasures for a wizard.”

She couldn’t keep a hold on her terror anymore. She wriggled her wrists, yanked at them as heavily as she could. They held fast, and she cried out in terror, yanking them down again and again as he pulled her underwear off, headboard rattling. The lashings cut into her wrists, and she bit off a frustrated scream. No detectable give.

Her dress was banished and crumpled in a heap on the stone floors.

“Oh, but what is this?” He pulled his fingers up across her sex. “You are ready, my witch, properly ready now.” A heavy hand ran up the back of her thigh, cupping her arse and pulling it to the side. “One might wonder if you wanted to be taken like an insolent whore.”

“No,” Hermione breathed, voice shaking. “No, no, no.”

“No?”

“No, please. Please, I’m _begging_ you.”

“You _beg_ me?”

He pressed the length of his warm body up hard along her, mounting her. The sheer weight of him winded her, and she trembled, air now impossible to get into her lungs. She was feeling faint, now. “You do not need to beg me, witch.” 

The hot, blunt head of his cock lay heavy at the nape of her back, and he drew back.

“Please don’t touch me,” she whimpered out, thick tears rolling out. “I’m sorry, but- please - _please_ don’t touch me.”

He notched himself hard against her sex and hissed between his teeth.

“You are especially warm, witch.” He draped himself forward again over her. “Your body cries out for this.”

He took her slowly, and she snapped open on him with a vengeance because of the angle. 

“Please,” she cried out into the pillow, writhing against the restraints. Either side of her waist, his hands had plunged down onto the mattress to hold up his weight, and she felt his forehead drop onto the back of her head.

“Oh, witch.” He rolled forward, slotting himself in. “Yes. _Yes_.”

Wet smacking sounds echoed in the room as he pumped forward in languid motions, and a hand rubbed circles at the nape of her back. He slipped into russian and murmured babble into the nape of her neck as she wrung her hands. 

They had slight give.

He was losing control - losing his pathological patience of punishment and cruelty, looking down where he was fucking into her - and the bindings were losing their form. Hermione swallowed. 

“Don’t do this,” she whimpered. He sighed above her and ground down into her; she bit her lip and muffled a yelp, and she actually - she felt him _twitch_. Cold hatred seethed through her belly.

She grit her teeth until they shot pain through her jaw. He could make him lose control.

“Please, Antonin, stop -” she gulped down air, barely able to escape the black dots prickling her vision, and he moaned with his mouth pressed against her braid.

She had to keep sucking in air.

 _Breathe_ , she screamed to herself. _Breathe!_

She felt faint, before she realised she was coming in and out of consciousness, losing clumps of time - 

-now he was flat against her again, sliding against her back, rolling deep into her. The sounds they were making together were filthy and wet, and he moaned and sucked hard on her neck-

And then the black prickled her vision away again.

She thought she felt stubble and lips against her ear, then-

Moaning, loud moaning, as he crushed all his weight down on his hips, driving his cock into her very core. The seizing agony jolted her out of darkness again and she stared in shock at her limp wrists as he roared hoarsely out over her, dropping his forehead on the back of her head and rocking firm up against her cervix.

Almost autonomously, her hand slipped down and gripped the blade.

She swiveled round and slashed _hard_.

The sound died in his throat.

Hot liquid sprayed out and blinded her, drenching her as his full weight slammed down. She gasped for air, face down again while blood - hot, _molten_ blood - splattered into her hair and pooled over her back, rolling down the side of her body in copious, warm stripes. A wet gargle sounded out over her, and his head lolled to the side. She wriggled as hard as she could. The first thing that gave way was his fat cock, slipping out from her, and a stripe of hot come slid down her sex. 

She gagged. 

The blood between them lubricated his body, and she slipped out from him, flopping onto the floor with a wet slap. She threw the glass fragment away and clutched her shaking hands close to her chest. Her eyes snapped to his.

His pupils were still twitching, his lips slightly apart. His throat still poured a hot stream out onto the bed.

“ _Die_ , you foul monster.” She spat, her voice shaking as she shuffled away. 

The corner of his lip twitched, and she saw crimson striped up along his gums, before his pupils slid out to a distant, unseeing stare. Crimson blood still poured out and pattered onto the stone floor from his slashed throat, and she threw up on the stones.

She scrambled hard back into the stone wall and dry retched twice.

Hyperventilation heaved at her chest, and her hands checked around her throat. She was sure she was bleeding, somehow. She was _drenched_ , and in broad swipes of her hand she wiped her body again, and again and again. 

_Wand._

_I need his wand._

She darted to his crumpled robes on the floor and pulled out his wand, an ugly whip of a thing that needled at her hand as soon as she touched it. She leveled it at him for a long moment.

His chest was still.

The blood had stopped pouring.

Pain thumped between her legs, and she grit her teeth. Inside, the smouldering intent to kill bubbled in her chest, and she knew she would have been capable of a killing curse. She looked down at his hateful, naked body, roped with white scars and wiry hair, and crimson blood on his arms - and around the stone prison - and whirled away from him a final time.

“Bombarda,” she shouted, and the stones of the prison exploded away.

She snatched up the linen dress at the side of the bed, yanking it down over her shoulders and stumbled into a familiar forest with tall, black trees, and runes, and boulders. Splitting pain shot up from between her legs.

“Harry,” she screamed out into the open forest. “Harry!”

Her voice wobbled and she searched long in the distance. Her nerves were frayed and adrenaline was making her shake. Pulling up the dress, she looked down at her thighs, blood and glistening white had smeared together. 

She couldn’t even _remember a contraception spell_.

Shock seized her. 

She’d never forgotten a spell before in her _life_. 

She heaved in a gasp and held the corner of the dress, pulling it across her thighs and scrubbing it against her burning sex, again and again. When it was too agonising, she dropped the hem of the dress, and stumbled forward, eyes tracking along the horizon with urgency.

“Harry! Harry!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! An epilogue is incoming!
> 
> I'm so grateful for your patience with my first fanfic, and really appreciate everyone who followed along, it's been such a positive experience. If you want to read a oneshot to make up for the long wait, here is a [Hermione/Fenrir Greyback oneshot!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25917661) I'm working my way through the Death Eaters.
> 
> The first chapter of my next serial fic is also up now, [a Hermione/Lucius Malfoy stalking fic.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25925023/chapters/63010546)
> 
> The epilogue is 95% finished and will be up in a couple of days. Thanks again! ❤️❤️❤️


	9. epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hermione survives the fallout of Antonin Dolohov.

Stumbling away, a patronus had refused to come to Hermione. Every memory she had of her mother had the joy sucked out of it when her mind snapped back to the fact that she didn’t know what her _own father_ looked like. She stumbled forward as fast as she could without looking back.

In the shock of what happened, time blurred. Details were painted in broad strokes. 

The apparition crack nearby was an Auror who stared slackjawed at Hermione before firing off a patronus to Harry, who arrived not two minutes later. There was a gauntness to him. 

“Hermione,” he said breathlessly, a look of sheer pain and desperation etched into his face.

In a wordless embrace, they’d internationally port-keyed to Saint Mungo’s so fast that she had no time to brace. It didn’t matter; her stomach had been emptied out beside Dolohov’s corpse. She landed on her knees in the Auror’s waiting room, thankfully empty of others.

“I knew you were alive.” He knelt. His eyes searched her face with abject relief. “I _knew_ that you were out there, and alive. We’ve looked every day.”

She tried to hold on to him, to feel gratitude, or safe, or _something_. Instead, a chasm of shock yawned wide and she felt herself staring at the wall, eyes tightened into pinpricks, barely taking note of the healers and the Auror who darted in and began their work - their careful questions and careful touching.

Distantly, she felt Dolohov’s blood dripping from the back of her hair and slithering down the nape of her neck. 

It took hours for her to be de-hexed, scanned and examined. Contraceptive spells were cast. Her hair and skin was cleaned. 

Her body inspected. 

“Miss Granger,” the healer blinked between her legs, as she lay on the table. “Would you like this - would you prefer to be healed here?”

“No. Don’t.” 

There were incessant questions. Some she could answer, some that she couldn’t. Her attention drifted. Her skin hummed in stress; seemed to want to writhe off.

Somehow, she ended up with Shell Cottage, wrapped tight in blankets on her bed at four oclock in the morning. Fleur and Bill hadn’t converted her room to a nursery. Had expected her home, and Fleur couldn’t bear to touch Hermione’s things. They were away for the night, she remembered being told, so it was just Harry. He said he couldn’t sleep, so he just sat and stared. She felt like she should _perform_ relief - some sort of outburst, or weeping or _something_ \- but she closed her eyes and folded into herself instead.

“The Lovegoods.” She found herself saying.

“They’re safe.” 

_Dolohov is dead._

“And my healer?”

She heard him swallow. “We’re still looking for her.”

Hermione felt her sense of time stretch. In her mind, she wasn’t in Shell Cottage - she was sitting in front of her healer again. Tight cropped hair. Dark skin. Kind smile. Casting diagnostic charms and listening with earnest nods.

“Do you remember her name?”

“Claire.”

 _Claire is dead too,_ Hermione thought, and slipped into the void.

\-------------

It turns out that surviving a graphic trauma was a lot of work.

Fleur had sworn at the top of her lungs at the reporters that requested to firecall Shell Cottage. (“Her second night home?” She had screeched at the fireplace.)

The Ministry wanted to meet with Hermione to arrange a formal apology for the leaks of information that ended up with Dolohov. 

(The leakers had acted under duress, but the Ministry was terribly sorry - and anxious for that apology to be well received, Harry noted grimly)

Then there was the owls. The letter pile on the coffee table at Shell Cottage _towered_. Bill had to charm the windows closed on the first morning that Hermione was back at Shell Cottage, but the owls formed a disgruntled line on the pine tree outside over the cottage. Hermione felt awful when the weather turned bad, blustering their poor huddled forms, so she let them all swoop in at once through the front door.

After three days of exhaustive medical examinations, Auror interviews and prepared statements (through which she unbraided and rebraided her hair about twice an hour), she headed home to relax at Shell Cottage-

-and found herself comforting Molly and Arthur over dinner, both earnestly pleading for forgiveness. For what, Hermione wasn’t so sure. Fleur soon joined in the tearful cacophony.

“I blamed myself,” she bawled, “each day - you couldn’t know it, but- I knew something was different that day, and-” She sucked in a sob, her protruding belly wobbling, and Bill gripped her by the shoulders. Hermione gave her a reassuring hug. 

There was almost no time to simply put herself together.

The most closure she got was the exhaustive reproductive health checkup she got at Saint Mungo’s. She was surprisingly healthy. She wasn’t pregnant. She could finally start to put things behind her, she thought.

But getting better was hard enough on its own, and that was without trying to accommodate everyone else’s needs with a terse smile and assurances. 

It was after being home at Shell Cottage for a whole week before Ginny found Hermione bundled with blankets on the sofa. She passed Hermione a cup of tea, plopping down beside her. 

Hermione was waiting for some kind of conversation to start, for some well-meaning platitudes to begin, but they both simply stared out at the sand flats that stretched into the ocean. 

“Harry had this, too.” Ginny said, after five minutes. 

Hermione blinked slowly and looked over to Ginny. “Pardon?”

“Having to comfort people for what happened to him. Same with me after Tom Riddle’s diary, but it was worse with him, though.” She sipped from her tea and flopped a corner of one of Hermione’s blankets over her own lap. “He needed help with it.”

Hermione burrowed deeper into the blankets on the sofa, letting the warmth of her tea mug seep into her hands and watching the waves roll up the beach. Slowly, the words clicked into place, and she felt like a name had been given to her exhaustion. “How’d you help him?”

“I told everyone to pack it in.” Ginny bobbed her slipper on her foot. “They think I’m a cow now, but I don’t mind.” She passed her a biscuit. “I’ll do the same for you, too, if you like.”

“What does telling people to ‘pack it in’ entail, Ginny?”

“I dunno.” Ginny crunched into her biscuit. “I get creative.”

Hermione thought for a moment. Her and Harry were about the only people who had treated her like nothing had changed, while making no presumptions that she was the same - in a weird way. Letting her come to them and giving her space. Letting her know they were there. Simply being calm. Lacking a sort of frantic comforting.

“I think I’d like that.”

Ginny really _was_ creative, Hermione thought later that evening. When Bill tried to clear his throat and start a conversation awkwardly in the kitchen about his property warding, Ginny hollered from the bathroom.

“Hermione!”

Bill froze where he stood, the words having died in his mouth. Outside, the wind pattered rain on the windows in soft blusters. She and Bill stared at each other for another awkward beat, and Crookshanks padded past their feet. 

“Hermione, is this _normal_?” Ginny called out again from the bathroom.

“Sorry,” she said to Bill, and slunk off into the bathroom.

Ginny nodded at her over the sink.

\------------

Harry refused to leave Shell Cottage except to sleep at the burrow with Ginny or to go fetch updates from the Ministry. It turns out he was still a part of the investigation that was trying to locate her healer, Claire, and that her wand usage had last placed her out along a major river in Eastern Europe. 

Hermione swallowed. “Is there a thestral herd here?”

“There is,” he said slowly. “Why?”

“We won’t ever find her.” She turned to him. “That’s how he was going to get rid of me in the end, too, I think.”

Forensic examination, he told her, showed that the Dolohov prison (as the Ministry was calling it) had been under a fidelius charm. Months ago, after her abduction, Harry had refused to let up searching the area, having found the forest. He’d demanded a small contingency of Aurors to search it daily, and one had heard a smashing window after about day sixty, but it never amounted to anything. 

There were at least twenty historic sets of newborn bones buried around the property, the furthest dating back to the 14th century. The site was rife with exotic dark magic that the arithmancers and curse breakers were only just beginning to make sense of. Most to do with sex, pregnancy, fertility and birthing. 

Hermione has not been the first there, by far. 

The wards were ancient. To her horror, ward breakers also recovered evidence that they were a part of a succession of wards.

In other words, that there were more like it, hidden and untraceable, in that forest.

It was sick. She felt plagued with a guilt that they would never know if other women would starve to death in invisible prisons because Dolohov had died.

Or maybe they belonged to other wizards like him. 

Healers eventually broke the news that Hermione would never know what happened to her in the months she lost while abducted. Forensic mind magic determined that some parts of Hermione’s memories and thoughts had been destroyed for good. She spent a full two hours below diagnostic golden threads above her head, four healers meticulously mapping different entanglements and missing pieces. The conclusion only gave her more questions. 

“There have been subtle interferences. We won’t be able to determine with any certainty what was changed unless you notice a difference.” The healer was apologetic. “But there are workarounds. He seems to have destroyed your mind’s ability to retain the contraception spell we commonly use in Britain.”

“I see.”

“But we can teach you another one - a french one, perhaps, or one from South America - they have a number of spells with no side effects.”

“I won’t need a contraception spell right now,” Hermione replied flatly. “But thank you.”

————-

“I killed you.”

“You did,” he murmured, rucking up her linen dress and climbing his huge, naked form over her. Even in nightmares he still retained his lumbering, radiating heat that rolled off of his body when he lay down against her. His mouth sucked in her nipple, and muscles behind her navel twisted at the sensation. There was a wet pop when he pulled back. “When you feel this pulling at your breast, the body remembers. Down here.”

His hand slipped up to the juncture between her legs. Light swirls of his finger on her clit tightened a coil of pleasure around his intruding fingers pressed into her, while his mouth sucked hard at her nipple. His erection lay burning against her leg and thrust forward gently as he sighed.

 _Wake up. Wake up, Hermione, for the love of_ god-

“There isn’t any shame in it. It is to remind women that the gift of children at the breast comes from men.”

“I hate you.” Hermione said to the skylight. “They burned your body.” 

“I expect they did.” He kneaded his mouth against her nipple again and curled his fingers. Hermione gasped. “Can your body climax without me, little witch?” 

She scrunched her eyes shut. “You should have been fed to thestrals.” 

He sighed against her skin, hot breath rolling down her body, and then lifted himself to settle between her legs, mattress plunging on either side of her body from his forearms. “It isn’t healthy to go without pleasures. You should be stretched and enjoyed before birth.” He brushed the hair away from her face and kissed below her ear. “Hermione.”

What felt like hours later, she woke in waves of warm pleasure rippling out from her. Her fist slammed down into the mattress. In the bathroom, she found her stray button still undone, changed her underwear, and fixed herself a hot water bottle. When she stalked out to the sofa and stared at the beach, sun still below the horizon, a burning sense of uneasiness rattled her. 

Fleur was lovely. 

Bill was kind. 

Ginny and Harry had been invaluable, supportive advocates. 

But the restlessness that simmered away simply got stronger, and stronger, and stronger. 

\------------------------

Jean Granger peered out from the kitchen window. “What is she-” 

“I have _no idea_.” John Granger squinted beside her.

The Grangers, of number 124, Poplar Avenue, Melbourne, peered over the fence at one of the new occupants of the neighbouring property - who seemed to be-

“She’s putting out their claw bathtub.” Jean was aghast, and pulled her hand across her riotous curls. “Oh, but they _loved_ that bathtub.”

“Well, I suppose it’s someone else’s house now.” John said. The girl hauled it down the concrete front stairs; the scratching made him wince in horror. Sulfur-crested cockatoos on the tree outside took flight in protest, but she dragged it forward in conviction, wiping away errant curls that bounced out from her braid.

“She can’t even be eighteen.” Jean fretted. “Go say hi to her parents, John. That _beautiful_ tub is going to scratch on the footpath. I’ll be right behind you”

John changed out of his work shirt (“Granger Dentistry”) and snatched a cardigan on the way out, grimacing at the sound of heavy steel crunching on the concrete footpath. He trotted over, past the bathtub that now had a cardboard sign declaring “FREE” on it, and caught her just at her front door. “Hi, how are you?” 

“Good afternoon.” Her voice was polite, but she had a wary look about her that John paused at. She swept her eyes over him quickly and paused. “Can I help you?”

“Er, I’m John Granger - from next door.” John thought he saw her throat bob. “I’m so sorry to barge on over. We were just hoping to come say hi to everyone properly.”

She nodded, seeming to search his face, and he wondered if she was terribly shy. A car driving by cut through the silence. He tried again: “Do I hear from your accent that you’re British? They always say we expats find each other over here, you know.”

“Do they?” She smiled and reached out. “Hermione.”

“A lovely name, Hermione. Do your parents enjoy Shakespeare?”

She seemed to hold her breath again, then glanced over his shoulder, and a proper smile crept over her face. John turned around to find Jean shuffling up the driveway with banana bread and anxious energy. 

“Hello, dear! Jean Granger, lovely to meet you - just lovely.” 

“Hermione. Nice to meet you.” The tension in her shoulders melted away. “Is that banana bread?”

“Home recipe, been making it for years. Shoes off?” Jean bustled past into the front door, cheeky as ever. “Are your parents in at the moment?”

Hermione opened her mouth for a moment, then closed it. “It’s just me here.” She lead them through a towering maze of boxes and around a fat, glowering gingercat. 

“We’re getting that tub,” Jean mouthed emphatically as they trailed behind her, flashing her eyes at him. But John was looking at the yellow mottling of healed bruises that carpeted the back of Hermione’s arms. He frowned.

\---------------------

So that was how they met Hermione. The next day, there was a young man adjusting her mailbox. John shook his hand and he introduced himself as Harry.

“And you’re her-?” John lingered on the end of the sentence.

“Oh, no she doesn’t, uh-” He caught himself. “She isn’t seeing anyone. Focuses on her studies. I came over to see how she was settling in, with my girlfriend, Ginny.” He gestured to the ginger girl fussing over boxes with Hermione.

When John waved to Hermione from the street, she gave a curt nod and walked back inside without greeting him. Harry turned to him with piercing green eyes. “Erm. Hermione has a type of head injury, I don’t know if she’s mentioned it. Sometimes she might not recognise you.” 

“Ah,” John said, “right.” 

It was another piece of a puzzle that John and Jean carefully left in her court. 

She was a curious girl, if John had to be honest, but both him and Jean found themselves unable to resist fussing. There was an owl that had taken up in the attic, but she liked him. Calligraphy seemed to be a prime hobby of hers: she had an endearing collection of parchments in a letter caddy and quills that littered her desk. 

Sometimes, though, she just sat outside for hours with her gingercat - Crookshanks, he was called - looking out at the eucalyptus trees along the escarpment, practicing her calligraphy with a quill, or reading. 

Or simply staring into space.

John was uncomfortably reminded of the stare his own grandmother had when she was widowed - like the gaze of someone living quietly in the epilogue of their life. Hermione had the same eyes as his grandmother as well. She’d smile at him when he was out hanging washing, but sometimes it just didn’t reach her eyes. 

It was in these small, domestic ways that John and Jean got to know her slowly. 

She was a creature of routine. Her hair was always braided, her nails painted, and she’d walk long hours in the evenings. She often didn’t volunteer details about herself, but they both sensed a fundamental goodness about her, and invited her over for Sunday breakfast one morning - just scrambled eggs and some lazing about with the newspaper and radio on in the background.

When John served up breakfast, she swallowed heavily. “Thank you for having me over as a guest.”

“You’re a wonderful friend, Hermione.” Jean looped her arm around Hermione’s shoulders and squeezed. “We’re so glad to have met you. We really are.” 

Hermione smiled and nodded stiffly, although something in her eyes made John hesitate. 

But on the whole, things felt right; they hadn’t been in Melbourne for very long, and it felt lovely to have a new life in Australia, with a dental practice, and Hermione there to look out for.

\------------------ 

It came crashing down one tuesday night with blood curdling screams from next door.

John bolted upright in his bed. They’d never had trouble in the neighbourhood, but the screaming stretched on and struck the fear of God into him. Jean, however, scrambled to get a dressing gown on and bolted out the door.

“Jean--!” John shouted, “You can’t just--!”

“Well, get the cricket bat, then!” 

Jean crashed outside without hesitation and lost a slipper heaving herself over the backyard fence tumbling over to Hermione’s property.

John came soon after with a hockey stick (it was closer, he told the police later, than the cricket bat), and found Jean comforting Hermione, who was hyperventilating and clutching her belly. Jean shooed him away furiously. 

They had to sedate her on the trip to hospital.

Cryptic pregnancy, it was called. 

Incredible that it had only been discovered after seven full months. She was a small young woman already, and the doctors wanted to make a case study of her condition, but she had flatly refused. Suddenly, she was due to have a baby in less than a few months.

The Grangers were passing time at the hospital cafeteria before her discharge when Harry and his girlfriend, Ginny, sat down to give them some context. Her poor parents had passed, Harry explained, and she’d needed to get away from the UK for a fresh start. When Jean asked tentatively about her previous boyfriend, if he was the right sort of man to be up to parenting, Ginny had gasped and snapped her mouth shut.

“I don’t-” Ginny started. “It wasn’t like that.”

Jean bobbed her head rapidly. “She’ll talk about it in her own time, I’m sure.”

“She still has to come back to England for the investigation,” Harry’s mouth hardened. “So I think when she’s ready. _If_ she’s ever ready.”

“Oh,” Jean said faintly, and her eyes shone. “Oh, right.”

John thought of the yellow bruising up her arms and wrung his hands under the table.

“She’d been checked in Britain and given a clean bill of health afterwards.” Harry raked his hands through his hair. “This is really, really cruel.”

\-------------------------------

With shock, trepidation, and a careful sense of fate, Jean Granger and John Granger approached Hermione about what kind of support would be helpful. Or perhaps she’d approached them. The conversation naturally fell to the baby, and all three of them found themselves at the same, mutual conclusion.

They were a bit long in the tooth, but Jean and John Granger were going to be parents.

Not even six weeks later, on the firm recommendation of two psychologists and Hermione’s OBGYN, she went under general anaesthetic. A healthy baby girl was safely delivered by c-section and brought straight to the Grangers, while Hermione was swept away into a waiting room of anxious friends.

Right until the final moment, she was given the chance to see the baby. Hermione was groggy and barely awake when she woke up, but she still managed to shake her head at the nurse.

“She said no.” Ginny was firm, staring at the nurses. “Alright?”

While the Grangers took a new baby home to adjust, they had an acute sense that Hermione needed a mix of space and tender care. 

So they simply sent her flowers and a card to get well soon, and a promise that when she was ready, they would absolutely come over next door - baby or no, whatever she needed.

\-----------------

Harry helped privately arrange for a healer to come to the house and heal Hermione immediately following her discharge from muggle hospital. 

The healer’s eyes went wide when she realised who Hermione was, and the c-section site was unmistakable, but they bound her with an unbreakable vow of silence so that no one in the wizarding world could know that Dolohov’s child had come into the world. 

But the six weeks of required healing that the muggle hospital advised was a good excuse to tell her mum and dad that she was getting bed rest and healing. They seemed more than understanding. They were becoming parents themselves next door. So she had time to process things.

Sometimes, Ginny or Harry would come stay. 

They’d land through the floo from the international portkey office in Sydney, sometimes almost on top of Crookshanks, and more often than not holding dinner from Molly. 

Other times, Fleur would bring Bill and baby Victoire.

She initially worried that having Fleur’s newborn around would feel upsetting, but it didn’t at all. 

It wasn’t the idea of babies that had terrified her. 

It was feeling Dolohov’s child wriggling deep in her belly. It was knowing the exact event that his child was conceived from and being unable to forget the blood on her skin. It was the greediness he expressed in her nightmares for her pregnancy, once she knew she was carrying.

The Ministry had burned his body, but some part of him had stuck in her mind. 

She was sure of it. 

He’d even been the one to make her realise about the pregnancy in a nightmare. She was stuck again on that bed below the skylight, and he flipped her into the same position as the final time he took her. Face down. Hands bound. Legs pressed apart. 

“Do you remember our final coupling? All of my life poured out onto you and inside you.” 

Heavy, wet kisses at the back of her neck made her wince her face into her shoulder. The warm jut of his erection pressed softly against her from above. 

“And it took. You did so well, my witch. So well,” he cooed, his arms posessively grasping her from behind. He crushed her greedily into his body and whispered into her ear as he blotted out the sun.

The pain when he started was ignorable. But when he dropped his hips and his weight onto her, white hot pain shot up through her centre and radiated out and around her belly, transforming into something else. She’d snapped awake to the unmistakable wriggling and kicking in its place. 

She didn’t even remember screaming herself hoarse.

Whatever spell had been used to hide the pregnancy had dissolved and left in its wake the squirming, heavy proof of rape. Harry and Ginny wanted to go on a warpath after Saint Mungo’s, but Hermione needed privacy more than apologies. It was likely to be another exotic spell they couldn’t screen for. She’d still had a regular menstrual cycle up until the moment she felt Dolohov’s child. It had been hidden perfectly. 

It didn’t matter anymore. 

Initially she lived in terror of falling in love with it. Having a child tear her and suckling on her the way he continued to do in her nightmares ( _-when you feel this pulling at your breast, the body remembers-_ ) - and for her to love it. What if he’d buried that instinct in her mind? To latch onto his children and adore them, no matter what he did to her in the prison?

Then another horrifying thought occurred to her. Perhaps he’d obliviated away any desires to keep children so he could keep putting them inside her with no resistance. Pulling them from her, only to force the next one into her. 

Until she died. 

Until she was fed to thestrals. 

Eventually Fleur would notice her staring into space and drag her inside, trying to distract her with baking, or painting nails. 

But once it was done - once his baby was out - she was able to start piecing together her life again in small ways.

\-------------

“I thought,” Fleur started with a conspiratorial tone, drumming her hand on Hermione’s sofa, “after we go to them - after we say hello-”

“Fleur,” Hermione interrupted. After six weeks of living next door, avoiding her own parents and casting muffling spell after muffling spell on her windows so she couldn’t hear the sound of Dolohov’s baby crying in the night - she was going to say hello.

And it still made her sick with fear. 

“Your hair.” Fleur concluded, with a flat stare. “Doesn’t it pull on your roots? With the braid? After every important days of a woman’s life, her hair should change, you know.”

_-every important day of your life, you will be bloodied in this way-_

Hermione sat down forcefully beside her on the couch and willed herself to focus on her hair. It did look a _little_ different. “What did you do after you gave birth?”

“Bled a lot,” she admitted. “But after _that_ we went to the salon, you see. To take some weight off of the length.” Fleur peered over at her. “You know, your mother might need a change too. Because she has become a mother. We could do it together.”

Every instinct made her squirm, but something in Hermione steeled. This was an important day. She could define it how she wanted to. With no blood. “We could. We should.”

“Yes. It is time for a new hairstyle.” Fleur resolved. She picked up coils of Hermione’s hair with the suspicious look of a gardener. “I found a muggle salon here - well, the woman is a squib, but they are excellent with their hands, you see. They need to be. We shall go after.” 

Half an hour later, Hermione felt almost embarrassed standing in her parents living room. 

“Baby Titania.” Jean bobbed the wee baby on her chest, watching Hermione with trepidation in their living room. Titania’s grey eyes opened up and sleepily wobbled over the room before settling back closed with a tiny sigh. “Titania Granger.”

Hermione searched for something to say. Her mouth was dry. Dolohov’s baby was Titania _Granger_. “You two really like Shakespeare, then?”

“We do, actually.” John gave a weak smile. “It’s a name from another one of his romances. And, well - Hermione’s taken.”

Hermione barely felt like she could breathe. “I suppose it is, yes.”

“You can have as little or as much to do with her or us as you like, you know,” Jean sniffed, then laughed through some tears. “We’re rather old. People think we’re the grandparents when we take her down to the shops. Say she’s got John’s nose too.”

Hermione swallowed. She wondered if she'd have features from her other side too. 

Dolohov's grey eyes. Perhaps features from his mother - raped and fed to thestrals. Or the man who had put Dolohov in her. Hermione found herself idly tracing Dolohov’s scar across her hip, before dragging her mind to her mother’s earnest gaze and steeling herself. 

“Fleur and I were thinking of going for a haircut later today. Would you like to come?”

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for everyone's encouragement and comments - it really was lovely becoming part of the fandom and writing a fanfic! 
> 
> If you want to follow my next fic, it's on its second chapter over [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25925023/chapters/63010546) , a Lucius Malfoy/Hermione Granger stalking story. If you like those kinds of themes.
> 
> Comments and kudos are so much appreciated 💖💖 I'm still getting better at writing, so I appreciate every thought!
> 
> Take care x


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